Day 6- Panama Canal

Today we got to go through the Panama Canal- well halfway at least. For those of you who are like me and do not know how that is possible I will explain. The Panama Canal is made up of 6 locks (well, that one ship would traverse anyway- two ships can actually go through at the same time so you realize there are 6 on each side.) Anyway- there are 3 locks that you pass through on the side you are entering (either Pacific or Atlantic), after you go through the first 3 locks you enter a HUGE manmade lake- Lake Gatun. Then, if you are continuing out through the opposite side you wait for your turn and go through the other 3 locks to reach the other ocean. In our case we went through the first three and then anchored in Lake Gatun for the day to wait for our turn to go back out the same direction we went in. It is truly amazing to watch this whole process and think that this was built almost 100 years ago! As you can see from the pictures there is not a lot of room for error here- there was less than 2 feet on each side of the ship. On one of the ships that went through with us you could see scrapes on the sides where they must have hit the concret wall! When you get there they send in a pilot to steer the boat in (apparently they do this in all of the ports as well). They also have dozens of tugboats hovering around to make sure none of the ships get out of control and bump into each other!

As soon as you enter the lock there are several little cart-thingys (you like my technical jargon?) that hook onto the front, middle and back of each side of the ship with cables to help keep it centered as you go through.

When you are in the first lock the gates close and it slowly fills up with water (or empties depending on if you are going into the lake or out to the ocean). It takes probably 10 minutes for this process. Once the lock is filled the front gates open and you go into the second lock and repeat the process. Each time rising to the next level. Repeat this a third time and then you finally go out into the lake. We arrived early in the morning and started going through the lock at about 6:30 am so in some of the pics we are wearing our PJ's- so please ignore the no-makeup, uncombed hair look I am sporting-lol. It was about 1 pm I think when we got to go back out. After going back through the locks (just reverse the above process) we then went to the port to wait for some of the people who had gotten off to do a tour. As we were entering the port there was a native tribe there dressed in their traditional native dress and painted and tatooed bodies(yep, think national geographic- women with no tops!) playing the drums and singing for us. We were then able to get off and shop in the flea market there. It was interesting but a lot of the stuff was junk imported from indonesia (yes there were still tags on the items-duh!). We bought some necklaces for the girls that we watched one of the Panamanias make and a neat painted whistle for Tyler. We didn't spend much time on land in Panama.

Here we are approaching the locks.

This was when we were going back out the canal- see how high the water is? Then is slowly drains out to bring you down to the level of the next lock.

Two ships passing in the night (or early morning, teehee).

We passed this ship going out.

You can see there are only a few inches between the ship (blue part) and the wall of the lock- crazy!!

yeah, that's me (heh, heh).

Going back out through the locks of course we had to have a pic of ourselves! :)

Our view of Panama from the ship going through the canal in the morning.

As we got off the ship in the port along with the naked natives there were also these people dressed in their traditional dancing constumes- beautiful!

This was the last time the Island Princess would be coming to Panama for the season so they Panamanians sent up fireworks for us as a goodbye!

I know this is sideways but if you want to watch you can see us moving through the lock in the canal.