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Panama
By Sydney Tremayne, Thu Dec 8th
Panama. Warm, tropical, palm trees silhouetted against thegolden sky of a setting sun. Yes, it is all those romanticthings. But it is so much more. Its capital is the most modern city south of the U.S. If this isthe third world, I missed the first somewhere in my travels.Panama City is a world-leading financial center with some 120banks, many with competing glass and steel monuments to commerce. Panama is shopping, U.S. style.
Many of the stores found on MainStreet, U.S.A., are here too. After all, the Panama Canal wasrun by Americans for almost 100 years, and the American militaryhad a major presence here until 1999. (Article continued below)
Panama once had a reputation as part of the pipeline forColombian drugs. It suffered under the savage dictatorship ofManuel Noriega, until he was captured and imprisoned by Americantroops in December, 1989. The country has had a peacefuldemocracy ever since. Like Costa Rica, it has no military. Moneyis spent on education instead, and its people have a high levelof literacy. And if you need medical attention here, your doctoris likely to have been trained in the U.S. or Europe. Panama is silver sand on the Caribbean side and black volcanicsand on the Pacific side. It has the second-largest volcaniccrater in the world inside which nestles a popular tourist andretirement town. (The largest is the Ngorongoro Crater inTanzania.) It is dessert and mountaintop. It can be humid allyear, or like spring for all 12 months, depending on where youare in this small country. Panama is world-class hotels and resorts, the best roads inCentral America by far (many were built by Americans). AndBrinks gives the country a top rating for personal safety. Panama is tales of pirates, of Spanish treasure and the fortsthat tried to protect it; it is jungle and monkeys and parrots.It has more birds than all of North America put together, some960 different species. There is even a jungle preserve rightinside the city limits. And Darien National Park on theColombian border is a jungle of monstrous size and one of theworld’s richest wildlife habitats. Panama, that thin strip of land joining the northern andsouthern halves of the Americas (yet running east to west)provides a 50-mile wide divide between the worlds two largestoceans. And its narrowness has provided the ingredients for muchof its history. The Spanish used it as a land bridge totransship Inca treasure en route to Spain. This attractedpirates whose exploits here made them household names. The rest,as they say, is history. The French tried to build a canal, and went broke. TheAmericans, who proved the value of the isthmus during the GoldRush, succeeded where the French had failed. And today, thePanama Canal, now run by Panamanians, produces much of thecountry’s wealth. More shipping is registered in Panama than inanywhere else on earth. Panama is a land of diversity. Its people are friendly. If yourcar breaks down, runs out of gas, or gets a flat, within a fewminutes someone will stop to help. Try that in Manhattan! Thelanguage is Spanish, but in the major hotels and many places inthe capital, the people who serve you speak English. And if theydon’t, there’s sure to be a helpful English-speaking personwithin earshot who will offer assistance. Currency: the U.S.dollar since 1904. What could be easier? About the author:Sydney Tremayne publishes http://www.yourpanama.com, a leadingwebsite for tourists and for potential ex-pat retirees inPanama. His team of experts gives regular Q&A teleseminars thatcan save costly mistakes. To find out more, go tohttp://www.yourpanama.com/fear.html
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