Jaunted

There are a bunch of different ways to fit in your canal time. The easiest is a day trip to Miraflores Lockes, the canal's Western outlet to the Pacific Ocean. If you've got less than a full day to see the canal, this is the way to go. Watching the ships raising and lowering here is an impressive sight, and there's also a visitors center/museum that explains the whole setup. From Panama City, you can get a cab to take you to Miraflores for about $10.

For those who want to get all up in the canal, you can actually book a mini-cruise on the Pacific Queen, a passenger ship that sails coast-to-coast every Saturday. If you're not working on a shipping vessel, it's one of the only ways to actually transit the entire canal, but the nine-hour voyage will set you back $165, so we had to give that option a pass.

A cheaper option (and not coincidentally, our favorite), is seeing the canal by rail. The Panama Railway takes you from Corozal, on the Pacific near Panama City, to the Caribbean town of Colon once a day. There's not much to see on either end of this voyage, but you get some views of the canal along the way, and it's a relaxing alternative to the cruise, and at $22 a ticket, much more affordable.

Related Stories:
· Panama Field Trip [Jaunted]
· This is Panama's Version of 'Pura Vida' [Jaunted]
· Panama Still Waiting on That Building of the Future [Jaunted]

[Photo: lyng883]