Panama City, Panama
New Year’s Eve in Panama City: occasional fireworks bursts light the night sky in the hours before midnight. The celebrations are starting early. As 2013 ticks closer here, the pops and bangs and flashes intensify, and are launched closer to the high-rises of downtown. Looks like safety isn’t the top priority — rockets fire from balconies, a signal flare arcs skyward then begins a slow descent between buildings. We’re watching it all from a rooftop bar, 62 stories up, at the newly opened Hard Rock Hotel Panama Megapolis.
About 10 minutes to midnight, the entire city seems to strike matches at once. The sky becomes ablaze in sparks of white and red and green — pyrotechnics whistling dangerously close to buildings. Who needs a professional display? Everyone in the city apparently has a role in this show.
Happy 2013! A few minutes after midnight, the sparkles and bursts have already fizzled. All that’s left is a thick, gray haze that drifts between buildings and closes off the sky, sealing in a metallic odor that remains until morning.
This was our second visit to Panama City, for a bit longer than the seven-hour whirlwind during a layover from Colombia in 2011. This time, we at least spent a couple of nights here. Not our best decision.
The Hard Rock Hotel was like a fussy toddler: still new to the world and not quite ready to be the center of attention. The staff was still finding its footing, and the guests were the guinea pigs. Where do we get wristbands for the New Year’s party? Four different answers. What time does it start? Three different answers.
The few elevators that were working (and sometimes not) stopped on almost every floor and filled quickly. Each up or down trip took 10-15 minutes. No dedicated express elevators were assigned to certain floors. It was a comedy of errors and poor communication, though the frustrated guests weren’t laughing.
Panama Canal
What are all these people looking at?
Actually, they’re seeing how the Panama Canal works from an observation deck at the Miraflores Visitors Center outside of Panama City.
The center has exhibition halls and a theater that showcase the history of the canal, a 50-mile waterway that was built a century ago to give ships an easier route between the Atlantic and the Pacific without having to navigate around the southern tip of South America. More than 13,000 vessels use the canal each year.
Since the Hard Rock was pretty much a bust, we set out for here on New Year’s Day after a walk through Casco Viejo, the Old City. We took a hop-on, hop-off tour bus on the roads that were mostly empty because of the holiday. On normal weekdays, the city’s roads are clogged with traffic, which we experienced first-hand during out last visit.
In the late afternoon, as the visitors center closed for the day, we walked to the bus pick-up spot early to be sure we didn’t miss its last round of the day. Another couple waited with us. But the bus driver decided to skip this stop, leaving the four of us stranded. We shared a cab to get back to the city center.
The next morning, after two days of misadventures, we bid good riddance to the hotel and headed to the airport. My partner spoke the truth as the skyline got smaller: “What have we learned from this? A seven-hour visit to Panama is just about right.”