Our next stop on the Celebrity Equinox cruise ship was in Colón, Panama. The city was founded in 1850 by builders of the Panama Railroad, but it wasn’t until the construction of the Panama Canal began did Colón really start to boom. Thousands of people from various backgrounds worked on the Canal contributing to Colón’s diversity. It is the second most populated city in Panama.
There are many interesting sights to see in Colon, Panama. But we only saw the Panama Canal because our driver was whack. He took us to two destinations. The Panama Canal and a lame shopping center that was literally in the ‘hood. I clutched my pearls when we arrived. We were only supposed to stay an hour at the mall (I’m using this term loosely) but a family that we shared the tour with came back an hour later. Folks were mad. The majority of us weren’t trying to stay at that place. They got back in the van and didn’t even apologize for being late. How rude?! But one passenger asked the family what happened? Why were they late? The parents didn’t even answer. But their son said the lines were very long. Mind you, they came back to the car without any bags. The lines were too long for your non-purchase? #confused
This was a lesson to all of us. If you are going to share a van/car with other travelers, you need to eyeball them and make sure their personalities aren’t off. I saw this family around the cruise ship and knew something wasn’t right about them. I rode the elevator with them several times and they didn’t speak…not even to each other. Which I found strange. And yes, they did speak English. They were from Barbados. Also, do some research and outline places you may want to visit and negotiate that with the driver.
Although there were a couple of places I missed out seeing in Panama, I did get to see one of the most incredible engineering marvels of the world in the Panama Canal. The canal is a very important route for international maritime trade. More than 815,000 vessels pass through it every year.
If you haven’t been on a cruise ship before, the ship waits for no one. If you don’t make it back onto the ship by the time it’s scheduled to leave, you WILL get left. That is unless you are on a cruise sanctioned excursion. That evening our cruise ship left 2 hours late because one the the Celebrity tours got stuck in the Panama Canal. Apparently this excursion actually took you through the Panama Canal in a boat. The tour was late getting back because the Panama Canal sets priority over who can go through the canal first. The tour boat arrived at the canal around the same time as other ships. But because the larger ships pay beaucoup dollars to go through the canal, they were allowed to cut in front of the tour boat. Which in turn caused them to be late getting back to the cruise ship because they had to wait for several big ships to pass ahead of them. Luckily they were on a Celebrity excursion so our cruise ship waited. If they were on their own tour, they would still be in Panama.
