Day one, January 30th, 2008
I’m dragging my body out of san Antonio to places where there is no email or phone to answer and where the sunlight may cause my translucent body to become brown (or at least a shade of red). I’m getting back into shape…. Starting tomorrow!
Today is our 37th wedding anniversary. I can’t believe how quickly time passes when you’re having fun. TODAY’s fun began by getting out of bed at 4:15 to dress for our trip to Costa Rica.
Everything went smoothly and as planned. One remarkable thing. As we were approaching the airport in San Jose, Lucy looked out her window and we were flying almost directly over their volcano. No one announced it, we just saw it. We’ve seen other volcanoes around the world. Notably, Moana Loa on the big island of Hawaii, and mount Vesuvius the volcano that destroyed Pompeii and looms over the Italian city of Naples, but this was different. It is exactly like a volcano a school kid would make for his project.
It was surrounded by relatively flat land and sticks straight up like a giant anthill. The top was smoking in a thin stream. If it had exploded right then we would have been catapulted into orbit, that’s how close we were.
We arrived in San Jose, Costa Rica by early afternoon. Lucy and I were the first ones off of the plane and after passing through customs I got in line to exchange some money into local currency. There were two lines. In the line next to me was a man who had several transactions that were taking some time. Immediately behind him was an American black man, loudly complaining about how long the guy in front of him was taking. One of the things he said was - he should never have changed lines – pretty much thinking out loud to share with anyone within hearing distance. My line was growing by the minute behind me and now was moving and his was stopped. This guy was fit to be tied and everyone was studiously ignoring him, including the individual in front of him at the other window (who I think was purposely slowing down his transactions in order to passively aggravate his critic). I was next in my line when one of the tellers came back from lunch and opened a SECOND window for my line. I was next! – I could see out of the corner of my eye that he had fallen to the floor and was writing in indignant pain over the injustice of it all (of course the language was brought down to the lowest denominator so all could understand – I don’t think the tellers understood, they were Spanish speakers with rudimentary English ability - luckily).
Meanwhile, Lucy was at the luggage carrel awaiting our bags – she had garnered a donkey to carry our three large bags and was feeding it a carrot. Just joking, it was a fairly modern airport, no donkeys in sight. They did however, have some strange procedures. In order to LEAVE the airport, you had to pass all of your luggage and carried items through an XRay machine. In the US, of course, they are more concerned with those getting ON the planes, not those getting off. So we lugged our bags onto the conveyer belt and watched the Costa Rican equivalent of the TSA sitting at the monitor with his feet up eating a sandwhich looking over his shoulder and ignoring the monitor. Strange but true.
We met a phalanx of taxi drivers as we exited the front of the airport and just as we emerged a van from our hotel pulled up. Smooth as silk.
The hotel was the Marriott and beautiful. Built like a large Spanish Hacienda around a center couryard. Spanish tile everywhere, and Golf course out the window. We settled in and started to get sleepy around 6pm (having had only a few hours sleep the night before). Just as we were beginning to mellow out, a salsa band cranked up loudly in the night club on the ground floor and the music reverberated throughout the entire hotel. This would have been aggravating if they had not been so GOOD. Because of the open construction of the hotel around the center courtyard, and the total absence of carpeting and other noise dampening construction, it was as though we were sitting in the club listening first hand, the music came through crisp and muted in volume slightly by our front door, but otherwise clear. We thoroughly enjoyed it, although around 10pm we began to wonder how long they intended to play on. They stopped shortly thereafter and we had a great nights sleep. ATMOSPHERE!Thursday January 31, 2008 (Marriott Hotel, San Jose, Costa Rica).
Cup of Tea, Cup of coffee. Okay we’re ready to go. Today we transfer to the ship, the Crystal Symphony docked at the port of Caldera, which is an hour and a half bus ride from here. Tell you how that turns out - later.
(later…..)
Things continue to go well for us (charmed life). We woke up this morning and I telephone down to the cruise rep - they had a desk in the lobby as this was the official transfer spot to the ship. They were organizing all of the passengers onto buses for the transfer. She told me that since we had not availed ourselves of the cruise’s hotel / transfer package we would leave at 1pm, the first buses left at 10 am. Before traveling, we opted to make the hotel and transfer reservations ourselves – when we contrasted the cost of allowing the cruise line to book the hotel and doing it directly ourselves with the hotel, we cut the cost in half and got a better room in the process – complete with private lounge and FREE food. Now, I discovered the downside to doing this was that we would be on the LAST bus to the ship arriving with the herd of Bermuda short clad octogenarians (look it up – if you have a mac there is a dictionary on the dock).
So I asked her if we could get on Standby for the earlier bus and what were my chances. She said, the buses are full, your chances are 90%. I said “what? 90% - language misconnect, she meant 90% that we wouldn’t get on. Reminded me of a line in the movie Dumb and Dumber. Jim carrie professes his love to the female character. She replies – “You have a one in a million chance of me ever going out with you!” To which he replied (overjoyed) “Incredible…..I have a CHANCE!”
We packed up, sent our luggage down and went down to the lobby. Large table - three ladies in uniform handing out tickets and checking people in. We went up to the table and as we were waiting I heard a couple of folks being told the same thing we had heard on the phone, sorry buses full. Step to the side for the important folks to get through.
We got to the front and suddenly we were alone, all of the others who had been in line or milling about were gone. I struck up a friendly conversation with one of the girls, told her I’d spoken to someone earlier, the girl who I spoke to was actually sitting right there. She volunteered (quietly and very conspiratorily) to see if she could find us a seat on the early bus. She got up and disappeared down the hallway. Came back with a big smile and two tickets for us on the first bus. As we were signing for the tickets I continued to hear more rejections going on around us. As I said, charmed life.
When we actually got on the bus (we were on the last of 3 leaving at 10am), it turned out it was only half full. They were just enforcing the “give us extra money for the privilege” policy.
The trip to the port of Caldera was on an air-conditioned bus. The road wound up into the mountains on a narrow two lane highway, then down the other side on an equally adventurous steep ride This thrilling trip included; passing in no passing zones, passing on curves and our tires coming within inches of deep drainage ditches on both sides of the road. We humans, however, don’t believe anything can ever happen to us (like crashing off a huge cliff and plunging, screaming like little girls, into the ravine). Nothing happened. We made it. The only remarkable thing that I experienced, (other than avoiding a gruesome death in a third world country, of course) was using the “facilities” aboard the bus. Call of nature midway on the mountain roads necessitated me being the only one on the bus to avail himself of the restroom that they had in the center of the bus. I stood up and walked to the stairs that descended down to the modern, clean restroom (think airline restroom). I couldn’t find a light switch, so I was esconsed in a pitch black room being buffeted in all directions as the bus made continuous hairpin turns. Luckily my pilot training came in handy and I didn’t fall in, fall off or get motion sickness. And to top if all off, I made it down the aisle of the bus (we were in the first seats) without landing in the lap of some little old lady – THAT was the hard part. I found out afterwards that if I had LOCKED the door, the light would have come on.
The ship is beautiful and populated with roughly only about 30% of the passengers aboard that you might find aboard a similar sized ship like on Holland America, I haven’t really seen what I would consider to be a “crowd” anywhere. We had heard the food was the best on this cruise line compared to allothers. Didn’t believe it, sounded like hype. We’ve had some pretty amazing food aboard ships in the past and to say one line is better than another ….. well, you know. We arrived around noon and the staterooms weren’t ready until after three so we had lunch (hamburgers and a steak sandwich). How good can a hamburger be? INCREDIBLE! I think they were grilling sirloin not hamburger, the steak was a REAL steak and it was melt in your mouth tender. Dinner was amazing too. They had balloons at our table for our anniversary and we ate fish for lucy and steak for me. Everything was incredible, not a single mediocre thing on the plate.
10 am February 1, 2008, aboard the Crystal Symphony, at sea abeam Central America, passing through the “golfo de Chiriqui”, position 07 degrees 45, 91N / 082 degrees 11, 26 W
Day at sea today, February first – which will allow us to explore the ship – flat sea with minimal rocking movement so the odds of getting seasick are low at the moment.
We arrive at the Panama Canal tomorrow morning at 7am, February 2nd. Lucy’s birthday AND the wedding day of our nephew Markie. We will be thinking of the newlyweds and celebrating another year of life for Lucy at the same time tomorrow.
6 am February 2, 2008, aboard the Crystal Symphony, Awaiting entry into the Panama Canal. Sitting amongst other ships awaiting the “pilot” to board the ship and guide us into the first Lock.
The meaning of life? It’s all about water pressure.
I awoke at 5am in anticipation of the alarm that I had set for six. The goal was to arrive at the air conditioned observation deck in time to garner a front row seat to view this event. I strolled into what I thought would be an empty room, and found that there were about twenty other couples already here. Only one remaining front row set of seats, which I procured, well off to the side – but still better than standing on tiptoes in the rear trying to see.
Water pressure….. Drives the panama canal AND is a pleasure in the shower. There are two places where I’m an extremely happy guy (shower-wise). Rita’s guest room - shower (Alexi’s bathroom) and the shower on this ship. Turn it on and the blast pins you to the wall. I have to figure some way to increase the water pressure at our home.
The Panama Canal is interesting – hence a major cruise ship destination. Yesterday, I watched a historical perspective on television. The engineering and construction of the canal was and is a marvel.
It began with the French who had constructed the Suez canal. They were rife with nationalism and flush with their success. They felt they could do anything at that particular time. Long story short, they gave up after ten or fifteen years of trying to dig through solid rock through an impenetrable jungle. The French left, much as they did in Vietnam. A few years later we picked up the project. Two of our physicians, Walter Reed and another approached it from a different perspective. Instead of macho forging ahead and dropping like flies due to malaria and yellow fever, the US discovered the cause of the epidemic and virtually eliminated it, allowing the work to proceed without the scary death toll. Additionally, American engineers developed a method whereby the project could be done much more efficiently.
The French wanted, like the Suez canal, to dig the Panama canal at sea level between the two coastlines. Unfortunately there are Jungle, huge mountains and raging rivers in between. At its worst they would have had to dig a trench six hundred feet deep and nearly 30 miles long into the mountains in solid rock to accomplish this. After many years, and innumerable losses due to accidents and disease, the company undertaking it for France went bankrupt.
What the American engineers did was to approach these problems with a little Yankee ingenuity. During the rainy season, the downpours were so heavy that they caused huge mud slides which would fill in the trenches that the French had dug. Whole mountainsides would collapse into the excavations on a routine basis. DeLesseps, the French engineer, compared it to digging a large whole on a sandy beach, the more you dug, the more the sand flows back into the hole.
We solved the problem of the rainy season where all of the rivers turn into torrential floods, by damming all river exits to the sea up and creating a huge lake high up in the mountains in the center of the isthmus. What were previously mountain tops became islands in the lake.
We waited among dozens of ships around the entrance to the canal and had priority since our ship had paid "extra" for the privilege. As we positioned ourselves to sail into the canal leading to the first lock, there was a beautiful view of Panama City. At a distance it appeared to be beautiful, large and modern.
We sailed underneath the bridge of the Americas, the entrance to the panama canal across which the pan american highway passes (running from alaska to the tip of south America.
There are a series of “locks” at each end of the canal into which a ship moves and is raised to the level of the next lock until they’re released into the lake to cross and begin the process descending at the other side. What I find amazing is that the mechanics of the whole thing are so simple. The huge gates are hollow and buoyant and open and close by the use of a simple 24 horse power motor. Because the gates don’t close flat, but rather in the shape of a “V” the pressure of the water in the lock further holds them shut. The Panamanian who gave us a blow by blow description as we progressed through the channel said that any one of the little old ladies on this ship could push them shut or open – they are so perfectly balanced.
The water to fill the locks is not driven by any sort of pump but by simple gravity feed from the artificial lake created up in the mountains. The water flows into each lock through 18 foot wide underground pipes at the rate of 3 million gallons a minute. They further increased the efficacy of this huge water flow by adding turbines that generate electricity making the whole operation totally self sufficient. Over 25,000 people lost their life during the construction due to disease and accidents. We Americans reduced our disease lost to nearly zero but blew ourselves up in record numbers with explosives (what else is new).
Each ship is guided through the locks by attaching metal cables to the front and rear of the ship and anchoring them to what appears to be small railroad engines – two on each side, both front and rear. They do an amazing job of keeping the ship from hitting the sides and damaging the hull. We had four foot clearance on each side, some of the larger ships have as little as a few inches on each side. Apparently, this is not only an efficient operation but a profitable one. They said that our ship paid over $250,000 to transit and we were relatively small. Many of the ships pay much more. The smallest fee was by a world famous swimmer who swam the canal and was charged 36 cents. I observed that they seem to run one ship through roughly every fifteen minutes. Probably over a million dollars an hour, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. That idiot Jimmy Carter handed it back over to the Panamanians. Another wonderful decision by a bleeding heart democrat!
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