The great crossing though the Panama Locks transpired on Day 6. Below is a map of our approximate path through the new locks and the old.

First, we were on a cruise ship going through the first lock at Gatun Locks  (between #1 and #2 below)  then on life boats (aka “ferries”), water shuttles (from #3-#4 below ), buses (dotted road from #4-#9 in Gamboa)) and eventually ferries that took us through the olde Pedro Miguel and the Miraflores Locks (#14-15). 

Entering Port at Colon the Ruby Princess gave us our first acquaintance with the locking process early in the morning, sailing through the the newest installation at Gatun Lake. The lock walls, embedded in the side walls, slid across to block water from the front and back. The moving walls formed the container that would be pumped full of fresh water to raise the enclosed boat 85 feet above the bottom, which is higher than the ocean bottom. The fresh water avoids the ecological clash of merging one ocean’s sea water with the other.

 

The trip through the old locks was more adventurous, because we had another touring ferry on one side and a thirty-foot sailboat on the other. The sailboat was lashed to our starboard side, so we didn’t bounce against each other in transit.  So we inched into the Pedro Miguel Lock [#4), and the doors closed behind and in front of us. This time they closed on a hinge, as the early locks did (photograph below).

The entourage cleared the Pedro Miguel lock and spread out as they advanced on the Mirafloras lock (between 14 & 15).  Then back into formation for the second lock. No cubic foot of water was wasted to get four craft though the locks.

We circled Panama City, an impressive skyline with modern skyscrapers. It could be a skyline in Qatar or Dubai, except for the poverty in its shadow, which we got to witness on the bus ride home– one dilapidated building after another. 

The significant message of the day: that immigrants from the barrios of the U.S. and Canada came to Panama to build the canal for $1/ day, plus lodging. The initial locks were completed in 1914, but work continued a century later with the construction of the new locks, completed May 2016.

We bussed back to Colon in time for a late dinner– 8 p.m.