Cool Spot: locks and crocks

As this man-made marvel turns 100, Chris Moss enjoys the wonders to be found along the Panama Canal

The canal drops hints along the roadside as you travel north out of Panama City. Old signage from the American era. A long cargo train bearing the name of the waterway. A tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire. The silvery flash of a mighty river.

It was 5am. I was groggy but excited. I've always liked engineering works - dams, railways, power stations - and the bigger the better. I was anxious to see one of the most famous man-made waterways in the world.

But perhaps hints were all you got if you couldn't afford a helicopter ride.

How, after all, can you take in a 77km-long waterway? What is the ideal vantage point from which to gawp at locks 12m deep or a container ship 290m long and weighing 65000 tons?

I was travelling with a guide, Gabriel, and driver, Roberto. I asked them about the canal and America and the forthcoming centenary. I expected anodyne stuff but what I got was a history lesson and a deep sense of what the canal means to Panamanians.

"We weren't allowed anywhere near it when we were kids," said Gabriel, born in 1984. "We grew up with a sense that we had invaders living among us."

Roberto said some of his family had worked for the Americans. "We did well out of the canal, but I still remember a lot of places where we weren't allowed to go - barracks, army clubs, airbases and some residential areas."

Both agreed that the watershed date was January 9 1964, when 21 students were killed by Canal Zone police officers for raising a Panamanian flag. Gabriel also ran through the Gold Rush of the late 1840s; the French attempt to build a lock-free canal in the 1880s; and December 31 1999, when the canal was signed over to Panama.

We passed a French cemetery "for the 22000 who died attempting to build that first canal", said Gabriel.

The road crossed an old ironwork bridge. Below us, the Río Chagres flowed into a huge body of water on our left - Gatun Lake, in effect the canal, without fanfare or even so much as a sign. All around was deep green forest.

Gabriel pointed to two man-made structures: the prison where Manuel Noriega, the former dictator, is said to be held, and a Titan crane, a trophy removed from Hitler's Germany by the US forces as war booty.

After passing the town of Gamboa (the operational centre for dredging the canal), we turned onto Pipeline Road, built in the '40s for an oil pipeline that was never laid. The road took us into the Soberanía National Park, where we parked and climbed a 30m observation tower.

We were only about 40 minutes from the capital and 365m from the canal, but Panama means "abundance" in the indigenous Cueva language, and I could see why. There were blue dacnises, a golden-hooded tanager, red-footed parakeets and hummingbirds. We heard howler monkeys.

Down at ground level, beside nearby Lake Calamito, we saw a toucan, a snail kite, a black-bellied whistling duck, a rusty-margined flycatcher, and white-throated capuchins jumping between palm trees. I spotted a dark shape close to the lilypads. It was an American crocodile - huge and powerful.

For those of us without the time or inclination to commit to a cruise through the canal, there are half-transits from Gamboa to Panama City. My excursion ship, the Pacific Queen, was loaded with German, Japanese and US tourists, as well as an assortment of Latin Americans. This meant every factoid and anecdote had to be delivered in four languages over the tannoy, but it didn't detract from the wonders we saw along the way, including the Culebra Cut, where engineers blasted apart a mountain on the continental divide; the mighty Pedro Miguel and Miraflores lock systems; and the retro-futuristic Mitsubishi electric "mules" that steady vessels; the seawater pelicans and freshwater herons and egrets perched on the bank waiting for the lock doors to release a new batch of fish; the Bridge of the Americas, upon which the Panamerican Highway runs north to Alaska and south to Darién. But it was the surreal sight of huge ships gliding quietly down the narrow canal, framed by forests, that was the highlight.

When it opened on August 15 1914, the Panama Canal shaved weeks off the journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific. For example, the voyage from New York to Guayaquil in Ecuador was reduced by almost 12000km. Today, it takes a ship about 22 days to get from Panama's Caribbean coast to its Pacific coast via the Strait of Magellan - which is a long wait for bananas or frozen goods, and a lot of fuel.

When we reached the Pacific, I saw dozens of ships waiting in the bay. There were dry bulk and refrigerated vessels, car carriers, oil and chemical tankers, a cruise ship, and a fleet of tuna fishing vessels at anchor, waiting for the season to begin. Ships have to wait days for their slot in the system, and it's odd to see them queuing like cars in a car park.

Panama's wonders don't end with the man-made. Three kilometres along the causeway from the marina where our half-transit ended was a new museum, the Biomuseo, which opened in March. Famous for its architect - Canadian Frank Gehry, the maverick behind the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao - and infamous for taking 10 years to build, this exhibition space adds a fresh narrative to the Panama story: the American Biotic Interchange. This is the term used for the transfer of non-marine species between North and South America that took place when the isthmus was formed three million years ago.

The museum dramatises the interchange as a single moment. Life-size, all-white sculptures of sabre-toothed tigers, giant sloths, armadillos and snakes form the centrepiece of the Biomuseo.

There are displays about extinct and endangered species, plus rocks and fossils. The message is that the interchange is still going on. You also grasp two poetic truths: first, Panama was a waterway aeons before the canal was dreamt up, and second, when Earth quaked and the continents joined up, the isthmus became a crossroads of animal and bird species.

I saw more of the real thing at the Pacific end of the canal. Invited to survey the new lock being built as part of the canal expansion project, I saw another crocodile - this time in the canal.

Driving down a very ordinary road, we saw a sloth, monkeys and coatis, similar to raccoons. My guides took it all in their stride and told me there were even jaguars in the canal-side forests.

At the new visitor centre overlooking Gatun Lake, the staff showed me a photograph of an ocelot that was found on board a container ship. Then, while visiting members of the Embera tribe on the Río Chagres, I saw capuchin monkeys, cormorants, kingfishers, sandpipers, egrets and little blue herons.

I'd expected the canal to be one theme among many during my trip to Panama, but it was, in a way, all I needed. I hiked it. I birdwatched and beach-bummed on it. I fished its lake and rode the gorgeous old train along its edge. I cruised half of it, drove all of it, and marvelled at its locks and crocs. You can kayak the canal, too, and swim in it.

America has not always been kind to Panama. But the 5527km² canal zone, by being militarised all those years, has become one of Central America's greatest wildlife havens.

The challenge for Panama, as it widens its canal and expands its mercantile ambitions, is to ensure that the wilderness and the vital crossroads stay intact. The hints of this grand project come not in signage, cranes or old railway lines but in the growls of howler monkeys, the roadside sloths, the lone croc slipping out of the way of a supertanker, and from the ocelot that tried to stow away.

The canal by numbers

The transit time is eight to 10 hours.

Total transits: 11956 in 2013.

1.7% (205 vessels) of the traffic comprises cruise ships.

Gatun Lake loses 197 million litres of water with every ship.

Three Empire State Buildings would fit into the new locks.

The 16 new lock gates weigh on average 3300 tons each.

Panamax ships - the largestin the current canal - carry up to 4400 containers. Post-Panamax ships, which will use the new locks, can carry up to 14000 containers. 

- © The Daily Telegraph