Great day in Panama City

Well, our day didn´t start off too well. The taxi driver who said he´d pick us up at 8:30 this morning to take us to the locks didn´t come, so we hailed another taxi. This nice taxi driver took us out to the locks and dropped us off. But we found out within a few minutes that no boats would be passing through the locks this day until noon. And this after everyone told us the best time to be at the locks is 9am. I guess this day they were doing some maintenance on the locks, and the boats had to wait. So, we didn´t know what to do. Our taxi driver had left, and we had asked him to be back for us at noon. We had no way to call him to come back, or to come for us later or anything. So we decided to try to get another taxi and have him take us to the causeway, where we figured we could use a phone to call the first taxi driver.
As luck would have it, there was a taxi driver waiting out front. We hired him to take us to the causeway and as we rode along, we could tell he was very nice and full of good information. Once at the causeway, we made a deal with him that for a certain price, he would take us to several places in Panama City worth visiting. So he was ours for the day! And he was so nice and willing to stop at whatever we wanted to see and do.

These were our views from the causeway.

 From the causeway, he drove us to Cerro Ancon, a hill in Panama City from where you can see in all directions. So, we saw the locks from up high, we saw the entire city of Panama City and it really was an impressive sight from up there.

 From Cerro Ancon, he (Francisco) drove us to Panama Viejo, the original site of Panama City. That was also extremely interesting.

We climbed this tower and got some great views from up there.

By this time it was lunch time, so Francisco drove us to Mi Pueblito, where we had a delicious lunch in a restaurant that was in a replica of an African village.

That's Francisco with an employee at Mi Pueblito.

From there, we drove to the locks of the Panama Canal. Francisco waited in the parking lot, and we agreed to meet him out there again in one hour. The locks were every bit as interesting as I thought they would be and we could have stayed there much longer.

 But from there, Francisco drove us back to our place where we thanked him for such a beautiful day. We were actually pretty tired at that point - must have been the heat mostly. It´s pretty hot here. Anyway, it was a great day.
In the evening, we walked to a store again, and bought a few items for breakfast, dropped them off at our place and then walked to a restaurant in the area called Ego. Guillermo had a delicious salmon dish and I had chicken paprika shish-kebobs. We got two desserts too, which were delicious, and that was how we ended our stay in Panama! Now it´s time to pack up and get ready for our flight home tomorrow.