panama city picture post
Panama City was where i landed here in Panama back in December 3, and the place where i returned to study Spanish from December 13.
The city is a strange place, because part of it used to be owned by the US when they administered the Canal Zone, so that corner of town is kinda weirdly isolated from the rest of town... But another part of town is isolated too thanks to a whole bunch of new highways and highrise development, presumably funded by offshore banks and various other corrupt property developers. The new developments are extremely pedestrian-hostile. There are fuck all pedestrian crossings in the city and several busy intersections inexplicably don't have any traffic lights at all. Cars just blast through at high speeds and every time you cross a road on foot it's a gamble. I have witnessed one traffic accident already in the short time i have been here, and many, many cars drive around with busted up panels from whatever crashes they got into. Meanwhile taxis are obscenely cheap, so a lot of people jump in a taxi and sit in traffic to get from A to B instead of walking the long and circuitous routes to the bus stops. There are few urban greenspaces, and the ones that are there aren't very easy to get to thanks to the car-first development. It's not a very pleasant city to wander around in, so i'm not really thrilled with having it as my home base for another month. Unfortunately, there is nowhere else in the country with enough expats to maintain a proper language school, so here i am.
This is a collection of photos i snapped of the city as i walked around.
The opening photo is one of the first photos i took in Panama, as i was walking on the narrow sidewalk next to a very busy road. There is a mural along this section of the road that depicts some violent and bloody images of the US invasion, but unfortunately because the road is so busy and there is a median divider, you can't easily get to an angle where you can actually see the mural as a pedestrian.
After walking along that stretch of road, i took a right to get to an entrance to the tallest mountain in the city, Cerro Ancón. I think when the US were occupying the country it wasn't accessible to the public, but now it's one of the few reasonable inner city hiking trails. The next picture is taken on the trail, and it reminds me so much of China, with these little police/miltary guard houses on the side of the road, which are now abandoned.
It was a typically overcast day, but from the peak of Cerro Ancón i was able to get my first view of the Panama Canal.
The other good view from the mountain is out to this section of town called Casco Viejo, the old town. This is the second old town of Panama City. The first old town was sacked and destroyed by Francis Drake and his gang of thugs, so the Spanish rebuilt the town at the site you can see in the next picture. The most notable feature is the obnoxious fucking highway on stilts that they built in a big loop around old town ostensibly to bypass it, but instead all they've done is fuck up the view. Panama's shitty urban planning in a nutshell right there.
At the foot of Cerro Ancón, there is one of the most notorious neighborhoods of Panama - El Chorillo. This is the place all the guidebooks tell you never to venture into. Supposedly it's extremely dangerous and full of gangs engaged in open warfare, stabbings, shootings, kidnapping tourists in broad daylight, etc etc. Maybe it's because of COVID or maybe i was just lucky, but i scoped out all the streets before heading down them, and stuck to the ones with the most open space and some other pedestrians and businesses along the way... I didn't get mugged. I did get some photos of the area, though. Here is a basketball court.
And here is a soccer court. The area was definitely pretty run-down and it's clearly a low income community. But these little sports facilities gave me the sense there was a bit of hope, at least the intent to provide places where kids could go to play. It wasn't like some of the areas i've seen in the US and Canada where there are drug deals happening openly on the streets and junkies lying in the gutter with needles in their arms.
Once i popped out of El Chorillo and got onto a rare pedestrian overpass, i took a photo looking back, so you can see the barrio and the Cerro Ancón behind it.
I found the neighborhood colorful and photogenic, so here is another photo, featuring a guy sitting on a crate under one of those trees with vines hanging out of it. Another cool thing along this stretch that is not pictured here was a big mural about domestic violence, and how important it is for people to speak out to break the cycle of abuse.
I liked this next photo because it shows a bunch of neat stuff in the same frame. This is me sitting at one of the waterfront restaurants where i ordered a beer and was given a styrofoam cup with ice to pour it into. In the background you can see that the tide is out, and all the fishing boats are just sitting there in the mud. A bunch of guys were just hanging out on the boats, where perhaps they live. Lots of fishing boats both here and elsewhere in Panama have a whole shit-ton of flag poles on them with black flags, which makes them look like awesome pirate ships. But some of the "flags" look more like plastic bags, so i wonder if actually it's just a makeshift scarecrow kinda thing, to make a bit of noise and movement that keeps the birds away?
After walking along the almost completely deserted waterfront (perhaps deserted thanks to that stupid fucking highway they have splattered across the city), i got to the edge of Casco Viejo. According to an expat i spoke to, the area was "a slum" until recently. I suppose this is a photo of the "slum" part. There is a more central section that has been buffed and polished to look like every old town you have ever seen in Europe - Florence, Venice, Vienna, Prague, you name it, they all look the same. In the gentrified part of the old town, drinks start at $5 and meals start at $15. In the "slum" you can get coffee for 50 cents, beer for under $2 and a full lunch for $5. Some locals were protesting the gentrification, and i don't blame them.
Here is another shot from Casco Viejo, of a demolished building whose historic façade has been preserved for rebuilding at a future unknown date.
A corner of Casco Viejo with another payphone.
This next photo was taken when i flew out of Panama City to Bocas del Toro. I was very lucky to have a window seat and get this shot of Bridge of the Americas just as a large container ship was heading into the Panama Canal.
Here is a much smaller canal from somewhere in the modern banking district of Panama City. I spent a few days walking up and down every road in town, and honestly the only interesting vistas i could find were these old creeks/rivers where a tiny bit of nature tries to push its way back out from the relentless concrete.
I liked this angle of some graffiti over the top of an empty lot advertizing some kind of obnoxious condo development that will be way out of the price range of most of the people who live in this country. Background is the World Trade Center. Pasted on top of the graffiti is an ad for some kind of miracle cure skin treatment. There are lots of posters up around town peddling snake oil. One that always makes me roll my eyes is the indigenous shaman who will help give you the lucky numbers in the lottery. Gambling is massive here. There are more street vendors selling lottery tickets than food.
This picture isn't of anything interesting in particular, i just liked the orange color of the slide being reflected in the outline of the nearby graffiti. This is from one of the few parks downtown.
Here is another one of those canals/storm drains that snakes its way through the buildings. Unfortunately i didn't get a shot of it, but clinging onto one of those concrete banks was a very large iguana. It kinda shocked me when it scuttled into the water and then swam across to the other side, where it proceeded to walk up an almost-vertical concrete wall and into the grass. Did you know giant fucking iguanas can swim just like alligators? And climb walls? Well, now you do.
I liked this angle of some graffiti in an empty lot in one of the more ritzy parts of town. This looks a bit run-down, but that's just because of where i chose to frame it. This is actually a pleasant, tree-lined residential neighborhood close to my school.
Some pretty graffiti.
I think this is my favorite photo of a weird little canal between the buildings, because you can't even see the sky. Concrete jungle for real.
Graffiti in another empty lot.
The lighting on the next photo is really strange, but i wanted to include it because it's one of the very few photos i have that shows that flowers do actually grow in Panama. You'd think that being a country which is basically all one massive rainforest there'd be all kinds of exotic blooms, but if there are they're not out at this time of year.
Here is a VFYW from the window of my host family's apartment. This was a middle class suburban area with a large supermarket and pharmacy just around the corner, and a fairly decent little park that i rarely visited due to the constant downpours. In the distance you can see some mountains which cannot be climbed.
Well, okay, one of them can be climbed. I found one other mountain in town (besides Cerro Ancón) with a public access road, and that was this one. It's actually a private road leading up to the Bahá'í Temple, one of only a few in the world. The temple is a dome right on top of the hill and a pretty chill spot to sit down and think for a while. Unfortunately - much like Cerro Ancón - it's a hill you can climb in about 15 minutes and then that's it. The gardens around the temple are all signposted that you are not to leave the path, so you can't really get any good views despite being on top of a hill. This is the best photo i could get, looking out to the hills and jungle on the edge of town, none of which have any hiking paths on them whatsoever. I mean, if you could even get there without a private vehicle (or taking a taxi), which you can't. Car culture in Panama fucking sucks.
To close it out, here is a photo i took on New Year's Eve of a feminist mural close to one of the government offices and near my hotel. On normal days it's hard to get an angle on this mural because so many cars are parked along here. Cars get parked all over the place in Panama, including over the sidewalks. There are these volunteer "parking attendants" who wave you in and charge you money to "watch" your car, but from what i understand it's basically a racket where if you don't pay them then they will key your car as punishment. Did i mention car culture in Panama sucks? Because it does. But their graffiti is refreshingly political and sometimes even poetic. (Unfortunately i didn't get many good graffiti photos due to the difficulty getting an angle between the constant traffic and/or parked cars, but i repeat myself.)
I hope this gives y'all a bit of a better picture of my days here in Panama. I walk about 45 minutes to school each day, mostly along car-choked roads. Very few people walk, except on certain blocks where there are food stands (known here as fondas), drink vendors (they sell a fermented corn and fruit drink called chicha), peddlers (mostly facemasks, face shields, tissues, candy and bananas), and those ubiquitous lottery ticket sellers. I mostly march quickly through the middle class commercial areas where the food is expensive and bland. The worst is how many new buildings are residential towers without any attached retail whatsoever. They all have carparks, though. For fuck's sake. Hideous.
I will try over the next month to do some field trips to some places nearby the city where perhaps i can do more interesting hikes. Assuming i am not completely wiped out on the weekends, like i have been for the past 3 weeks. Le sigh.
The city is a strange place, because part of it used to be owned by the US when they administered the Canal Zone, so that corner of town is kinda weirdly isolated from the rest of town... But another part of town is isolated too thanks to a whole bunch of new highways and highrise development, presumably funded by offshore banks and various other corrupt property developers. The new developments are extremely pedestrian-hostile. There are fuck all pedestrian crossings in the city and several busy intersections inexplicably don't have any traffic lights at all. Cars just blast through at high speeds and every time you cross a road on foot it's a gamble. I have witnessed one traffic accident already in the short time i have been here, and many, many cars drive around with busted up panels from whatever crashes they got into. Meanwhile taxis are obscenely cheap, so a lot of people jump in a taxi and sit in traffic to get from A to B instead of walking the long and circuitous routes to the bus stops. There are few urban greenspaces, and the ones that are there aren't very easy to get to thanks to the car-first development. It's not a very pleasant city to wander around in, so i'm not really thrilled with having it as my home base for another month. Unfortunately, there is nowhere else in the country with enough expats to maintain a proper language school, so here i am.
This is a collection of photos i snapped of the city as i walked around.
The opening photo is one of the first photos i took in Panama, as i was walking on the narrow sidewalk next to a very busy road. There is a mural along this section of the road that depicts some violent and bloody images of the US invasion, but unfortunately because the road is so busy and there is a median divider, you can't easily get to an angle where you can actually see the mural as a pedestrian.
After walking along that stretch of road, i took a right to get to an entrance to the tallest mountain in the city, Cerro Ancón. I think when the US were occupying the country it wasn't accessible to the public, but now it's one of the few reasonable inner city hiking trails. The next picture is taken on the trail, and it reminds me so much of China, with these little police/miltary guard houses on the side of the road, which are now abandoned.
It was a typically overcast day, but from the peak of Cerro Ancón i was able to get my first view of the Panama Canal.
The other good view from the mountain is out to this section of town called Casco Viejo, the old town. This is the second old town of Panama City. The first old town was sacked and destroyed by Francis Drake and his gang of thugs, so the Spanish rebuilt the town at the site you can see in the next picture. The most notable feature is the obnoxious fucking highway on stilts that they built in a big loop around old town ostensibly to bypass it, but instead all they've done is fuck up the view. Panama's shitty urban planning in a nutshell right there.
At the foot of Cerro Ancón, there is one of the most notorious neighborhoods of Panama - El Chorillo. This is the place all the guidebooks tell you never to venture into. Supposedly it's extremely dangerous and full of gangs engaged in open warfare, stabbings, shootings, kidnapping tourists in broad daylight, etc etc. Maybe it's because of COVID or maybe i was just lucky, but i scoped out all the streets before heading down them, and stuck to the ones with the most open space and some other pedestrians and businesses along the way... I didn't get mugged. I did get some photos of the area, though. Here is a basketball court.
And here is a soccer court. The area was definitely pretty run-down and it's clearly a low income community. But these little sports facilities gave me the sense there was a bit of hope, at least the intent to provide places where kids could go to play. It wasn't like some of the areas i've seen in the US and Canada where there are drug deals happening openly on the streets and junkies lying in the gutter with needles in their arms.
Once i popped out of El Chorillo and got onto a rare pedestrian overpass, i took a photo looking back, so you can see the barrio and the Cerro Ancón behind it.
I found the neighborhood colorful and photogenic, so here is another photo, featuring a guy sitting on a crate under one of those trees with vines hanging out of it. Another cool thing along this stretch that is not pictured here was a big mural about domestic violence, and how important it is for people to speak out to break the cycle of abuse.
I liked this next photo because it shows a bunch of neat stuff in the same frame. This is me sitting at one of the waterfront restaurants where i ordered a beer and was given a styrofoam cup with ice to pour it into. In the background you can see that the tide is out, and all the fishing boats are just sitting there in the mud. A bunch of guys were just hanging out on the boats, where perhaps they live. Lots of fishing boats both here and elsewhere in Panama have a whole shit-ton of flag poles on them with black flags, which makes them look like awesome pirate ships. But some of the "flags" look more like plastic bags, so i wonder if actually it's just a makeshift scarecrow kinda thing, to make a bit of noise and movement that keeps the birds away?
After walking along the almost completely deserted waterfront (perhaps deserted thanks to that stupid fucking highway they have splattered across the city), i got to the edge of Casco Viejo. According to an expat i spoke to, the area was "a slum" until recently. I suppose this is a photo of the "slum" part. There is a more central section that has been buffed and polished to look like every old town you have ever seen in Europe - Florence, Venice, Vienna, Prague, you name it, they all look the same. In the gentrified part of the old town, drinks start at $5 and meals start at $15. In the "slum" you can get coffee for 50 cents, beer for under $2 and a full lunch for $5. Some locals were protesting the gentrification, and i don't blame them.
Here is another shot from Casco Viejo, of a demolished building whose historic façade has been preserved for rebuilding at a future unknown date.
A corner of Casco Viejo with another payphone.
This next photo was taken when i flew out of Panama City to Bocas del Toro. I was very lucky to have a window seat and get this shot of Bridge of the Americas just as a large container ship was heading into the Panama Canal.
Here is a much smaller canal from somewhere in the modern banking district of Panama City. I spent a few days walking up and down every road in town, and honestly the only interesting vistas i could find were these old creeks/rivers where a tiny bit of nature tries to push its way back out from the relentless concrete.
I liked this angle of some graffiti over the top of an empty lot advertizing some kind of obnoxious condo development that will be way out of the price range of most of the people who live in this country. Background is the World Trade Center. Pasted on top of the graffiti is an ad for some kind of miracle cure skin treatment. There are lots of posters up around town peddling snake oil. One that always makes me roll my eyes is the indigenous shaman who will help give you the lucky numbers in the lottery. Gambling is massive here. There are more street vendors selling lottery tickets than food.
This picture isn't of anything interesting in particular, i just liked the orange color of the slide being reflected in the outline of the nearby graffiti. This is from one of the few parks downtown.
Here is another one of those canals/storm drains that snakes its way through the buildings. Unfortunately i didn't get a shot of it, but clinging onto one of those concrete banks was a very large iguana. It kinda shocked me when it scuttled into the water and then swam across to the other side, where it proceeded to walk up an almost-vertical concrete wall and into the grass. Did you know giant fucking iguanas can swim just like alligators? And climb walls? Well, now you do.
I liked this angle of some graffiti in an empty lot in one of the more ritzy parts of town. This looks a bit run-down, but that's just because of where i chose to frame it. This is actually a pleasant, tree-lined residential neighborhood close to my school.
Some pretty graffiti.
I think this is my favorite photo of a weird little canal between the buildings, because you can't even see the sky. Concrete jungle for real.
Graffiti in another empty lot.
The lighting on the next photo is really strange, but i wanted to include it because it's one of the very few photos i have that shows that flowers do actually grow in Panama. You'd think that being a country which is basically all one massive rainforest there'd be all kinds of exotic blooms, but if there are they're not out at this time of year.
Here is a VFYW from the window of my host family's apartment. This was a middle class suburban area with a large supermarket and pharmacy just around the corner, and a fairly decent little park that i rarely visited due to the constant downpours. In the distance you can see some mountains which cannot be climbed.
Well, okay, one of them can be climbed. I found one other mountain in town (besides Cerro Ancón) with a public access road, and that was this one. It's actually a private road leading up to the Bahá'í Temple, one of only a few in the world. The temple is a dome right on top of the hill and a pretty chill spot to sit down and think for a while. Unfortunately - much like Cerro Ancón - it's a hill you can climb in about 15 minutes and then that's it. The gardens around the temple are all signposted that you are not to leave the path, so you can't really get any good views despite being on top of a hill. This is the best photo i could get, looking out to the hills and jungle on the edge of town, none of which have any hiking paths on them whatsoever. I mean, if you could even get there without a private vehicle (or taking a taxi), which you can't. Car culture in Panama fucking sucks.
To close it out, here is a photo i took on New Year's Eve of a feminist mural close to one of the government offices and near my hotel. On normal days it's hard to get an angle on this mural because so many cars are parked along here. Cars get parked all over the place in Panama, including over the sidewalks. There are these volunteer "parking attendants" who wave you in and charge you money to "watch" your car, but from what i understand it's basically a racket where if you don't pay them then they will key your car as punishment. Did i mention car culture in Panama sucks? Because it does. But their graffiti is refreshingly political and sometimes even poetic. (Unfortunately i didn't get many good graffiti photos due to the difficulty getting an angle between the constant traffic and/or parked cars, but i repeat myself.)
I hope this gives y'all a bit of a better picture of my days here in Panama. I walk about 45 minutes to school each day, mostly along car-choked roads. Very few people walk, except on certain blocks where there are food stands (known here as fondas), drink vendors (they sell a fermented corn and fruit drink called chicha), peddlers (mostly facemasks, face shields, tissues, candy and bananas), and those ubiquitous lottery ticket sellers. I mostly march quickly through the middle class commercial areas where the food is expensive and bland. The worst is how many new buildings are residential towers without any attached retail whatsoever. They all have carparks, though. For fuck's sake. Hideous.
I will try over the next month to do some field trips to some places nearby the city where perhaps i can do more interesting hikes. Assuming i am not completely wiped out on the weekends, like i have been for the past 3 weeks. Le sigh.