Our last major bike ride of the tour started in a small town named San Francisco about ten miles north of Santiago, a significant city in the central-western part of Panama. San Francisco's claim to fame is that it has the oldest original church still in use in Panama; the central part of the country around Santiago was one of the first to be settled after the Spanish conquest.

If you look at a map of Panama you’ll notice that Santiago is located some distance inland roughly where the Panamanian isthmus has grown a southerly appendage known as the Azuero Peninsula . And being south of the mountainous Cordillera Central the area is low-lying dry climate country. That all makes for a real scorcher of a bike ride, one that started out fairly cool and pleasant I when we set out around 8:00 A.M. but one that rapidly got hotter to close to 100*F (38*C) by the time we finished around noon.

The saving grace was that the terrain was quite flat with only very modest and gradual hills. The relative flatness of the terrain meant there were no painfully slow uphills that lend themselves to overheating. When you can move fast on a bike the breeze cools you down somewhat regardless of how hot it is, and I’m quite strong at cycling on relatively flat terrain where I don’t have to fight gravity much to lift my significant bulk. Nevertheless, there was supposedly 500 meters (about 1,600 feet) of ascent and descent over the entire 52 km (31 mile) route, so it wasn’t quite totally flat.

I had somewhat mixed feelings about this ride overall. I do quite like scenery and tend to view a tour like this as being about travel and not just about being a test of endurance exercise under adverse conditions. The scenery in this part of central Panama was just not much to write home about, to the extent that I realized later I didn’t take a single scenery shot the whole route. At the very least if I’m going to be out on a bike for half a day I usually find some photogenic goats or cows to snap in their habitat . Not here, though, despite there being a fair amount of livestock grazing in the dry, shrubby tropical savannah countryside. On the other hand, the relative flatness of the terrain and almost complete lack of traffic along the route made it a good one in other respects.

Our last long ride ended at the Pan-American Highway, from Santiago all the way to Panama City a divided road worthy of the name highway. Moving eastward toward Panama City through the dry countryside things gradually become somewhat more prosperous looking. However, I still suspect that the country with highest per capita GDP in Central America must have one of the world’s most skewed distributions of income.

About two hours southwest of Panama City we stopped for lunch at a beach resort named Santa Catalina for lunch and some quality time at the beach. Hey, if you’re on a tour in Central America isn’t it almost obligatory that you have a chance to swim in both Atlantic and Pacific Oceans where they’re only about 50 miles apart? The beach was very nice and the Pargo Entero (whole fried red snapper) I had for lunch was exquisite . Who says Panamanian food is all bad?

I quite liked the flock of buzzards on the beach. I imagined them eyeing us all carefully and guessing which of the exhausted cyclists now stripping down for a swim was most likely to die of heatstroke and provide them with a fine meal.

We pulled into the boomtown that is Panama City and our posh digs at the Hampton Inn in the modern high rise Cangrejo neighborhood shortly before sunset. There was still a full day ahead in Panama City, but somehow it felt like the end of the tour. Although Central American countries aren’t large physically they’re strung together in a long line, and I’m pretty sure we traveled around a thousand miles from Granada to Panama City. We dinnered in a quite posh Peruvian restaurant next to the hotel that Chris picked. Although the food turned out to be quite good, the service was atrocious again in a way we’ve gotten used to in Panama. Did all these waiters just start serving people yesterday? How can people be so incompetent and still keep their jobs? Maybe you just need to stick to fast food in this country – there’s no shortage of American chain joints.

My room on the 7^th floor of the Hampton Inn felt much higher because of several stories of parking decks. Because of an uneven number of male passengers (three) who booked shared rooms on the trip I ended up with five nights in a single room on the tour, including the last two in Panama City. Somewhere, sometime, I must have done some good deeds I can’t recall to experience such good fortune. What did I do to deserve such a luxurious room all to myself? I better enjoy it while I can. It won’t be long until I’m pinching my pennies again and back in dumpy hostels.