Colon The Western entrance to the Canal

 Colon is a rugged port city. Huge Freeport area but lots of down on one’s luck areas. Shore excursions director gave it a caution. Because of the twist of Central America, the passage from Colon on the Caribbean to Panama City on the Pacific is actually a West to East passage.  Go figure. One can take a train or a highway from Colon to Panama City. We went in a bus. The Isthmus is not flat!  One could see shortly into the trip why a sea level canal was not possible. We passed sections of Gatun Lake, which provides drinking water, hydroelectric power and feeds the locks. We also saw parts of the Chargres River, which feeds the Lake, and the taming of which was an huge engineering achievement. December is the end of Panama’s long rainy season. Today our morning tour was hot and humid , and then around 2:00 the skies opened up- our guide said that it was the rainy season refusing to let go. 

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