Following 20th-century fires and post-WWII city’s economic decline, most of Colon’s upper and middle-class residents left, reducing the city’s ethnic diversity. Today, most of the city’s population is of Caribbean black and mixed mestizo ancestry, along with small South Asian, Chinese, and Arab communities still found within the city’s checkerboard layout of streets.

The scenic highlight of the town is the waterfront park facing the Limon Bay and the panorama of the container ships awaiting entry into the Panama Canal.

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Having to backtrack to the junction where I turned for Gamboa the day before, the next section of the road heading into the interior away from the canal, the secondary road traverses a beautiful stretch of the jungle. Alas, narrow with all the traffic it carries from Panama City, it gets very scenic and enjoyable to ride when the traffic subsides and the jungle canopy allows one to admire the rainforest.

In Chilibre, however, the scenic part ends as the jungle road reaches the mayhem of the Carretera Transístmica.

There are two highways connecting Pacific and Atlantic oceans along the Panama Canal isthmus – Panama Canal Expressway and Carretera Transístmica. The first is a toll road and cops will load you and your bike on a car and boot you out to the nearest exit, should you even get on this highway. The Expressway has a nice wide shoulder, so would be a way to ride between the two oceans, but unfortunately you can’t.

Carretera Transístmica is the old two-lane highway connecting Panama City with Colon. It carries most of the traffic between the two cities and is a lifeblood of the settlements along it. It has an intermittent shoulder-parking strip, if there is any at all, with a tarmac usually potholed, or overgrown by weeds and bushes. The lanes are narrow, traffic is constant, with trucks, chicken buses, and anything else with wheels. Traffic can be chaotic and the scenery along the road is nothing to write home about. Only occasionally, you may get a distant view of the canal, but mostly nil, views concealed by vegetation. Either you pass through ramshackle settlement areas or you are too busy avoiding potholes. Unfortunately, there is no better way to ride. This is the only option to cycle coast to coast between Panama City and Colon.

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The rainforest of Soberanía National Park is home to caymans, crocodiles, iguanas, and several hundred bird species. Located next to the Panama Canal, in the 16th century the Las Cruces Trail (Camino de Cruces) lead through this part of the jungle, used by the Spanish to transport gold across the isthmus to Portobelo, the Spanish port on the Caribbean whence they shipped the loot home to motherland.

Built 110 years ago to house employees of the Panama Canal and their dependents, Gamboa today is a quiet outpost, a gateway to the Soberania National Park.

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Once upon a time, there was an impenetrable jungle coast to coast, between the Atlantic and Pacific shores of Panama. Historically known as the Isthmus of Darien, it covered the narrow strip of land that lies between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean.

The idea of the Panama Canal, a water passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, dates back to 1513, when Vasco Núñez de Balboa, a Spanish explorer, governor, and conquistador, first crossed the isthmus, becoming the first European to lead an expedition to have reached the Pacific from the New World.

Cycling along the canal is the obvious and ideal route to begin the traverse of the isthmus between the two oceans. The traffic is not that heavy, but the road is narrow and has no shoulder. Still, I was glad to be out of the city and on the road again. Cycling light, no bike bags with only a daypack, I hoped for the best.

As the travel restrictions recently eased, after a year spent home, I thought it was time to get back on the road away from home and go cycling across Panama coast to coast.

In between the canal and the road, a railway line, known as the Panama Canal Railway, follows the canal. Its construction preceded the Panama Canal by half a century. The road does not always offer the view of the canal, but when it does, seeing giant container vessels quietly ply the narrow parts of the canal seems surreal.

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