NCL Cruise LA to Miami: Panama Canal

Panama Canal

December 6, 2016

Latitude 9° 9” N

“A full transit of the Panama Canal,” my friend Mary once told me, “is my next cruise.

But now it was our turn and this is what this cruise has really been all about.  For days, there have been signs around the Jewel telling us …8 days to the Panama Canal.  5 days to the Panama Canal.  2 days….

And then it was here.  And this is where a balcony was nice. 

We were at 9° 59” North, still within the subtropics when we forced ourselves out of bed at 6:45 a.m.  Daylight was creeping over Panama City and The NCL Jewel was waiting its queue to enter the first of six locks that would bring us from the Pacific End of the Canal to the Atlantic end—a distance of 90 km or 50 miles.

The statistics are staggering: 22,000 men and women dead from accidents, Yellow Fever, and Malaria; the largest civil engineering feat since the construction of the Great Pyramids at Cheops; $500,000,000.00 in 1912 dollars; millions of cubic yards of cement; men doing backbreaking work for $1.00 a day eating nothing by canned sardines and crackers.  And yet here we were, a hundred years later, sitting on our balcony off a posh air conditioned stateroom eating breakfast and me drinking Diet Coke.  Life hardly seems fair at times.

I spent a good chunk of the day in the Mandara Spa.  I’d paid $199.00 for the privilege of using that space and I’d used it pitifully little.  Today would be payback time.  It really was the perfect place.  We were on deck 12 with huge windows facing south.  At its peak, there were no more than six of us in that space.  When we reached the Gatun Locks—the second set of locks on the Caribbean Side, I was able to watch the entire process.  Slip into one lock with the help of vehicles pulling us with cables.  Wait for the water to rise, then slide into the next lock.  The entire process took almost two fascinating hours.

And this transit? What did it cost NCL? What did it cost each passenger on board?  It was far from free.  Because of the Jewel’s tonnage, NCL paid $480,000.00 to make this trip.  Each of us, in turn, forked over +/- $350.00 in “port fees.” 

By 5:00 pm we’d reached Cristobal Colon, Panama’s second largest city and the end, or beginning depending on perspective, of the canal.  A crocodile was sunning himself on a dock at the mouth of a small river—a small indication of what the men who built this canal had to deal with more than a century ago.  We had gone from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean in a mere eight hours—a journey that would have taken more than month to do at the beginning of the 20^th Century.  We were living lives those who built that marvel could never have imagined.

That night it was bed earlier than usual.  I sat writing this with the window opened and let the warm, humid night billow in. Tomorrow would be our last port—Cartagena, Colombia—and I wanted to be rested for that adventure.