A trip to the Canal is a must for any trip to Panama City. Its a textbook tourist mission, but once there, you’re amazed by the scale of this engineering structure. We took a $6 cab ride from Luna’s Castle to the the Midaflores locks, and $8 for the full tour. We got there just in time for a massive oil tanker the ‘Asopos’ to pass through the locks.
The tanker enters the lock, pulled by 4 guides on a track. Once gate 1 is closed, water fills the lower chamber making the tanker rise. The ship continues to rise until the water level in the upper and lower chambers are at the same level, which at the point gate 2 to opens.
Once open the tanker passes through into the upper chamber, this process happens again - however the upper chamber water level must now rise to the same level as the rest of the Canal. The tanker passes through gate 3 then progresses on north through the Canal. The whole process takes about 30mins. Chatting to a local lad who priced this tankers movement through the Midaflores locks at $300k. The locks operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Generating around $4 million a day at Midaflores alone, you begin to realise the massive potential of this developing nation.
An expansion project of Midaflores locks has recently begun west of the current locks. The focus is to ease pressure on the current locks, get bigger ships through and in turn more money for Panama. The project is costed at $5 billion over 7 years.
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