Colon Is For Batman
If you take the Colon route, be careful. The town is seriously dangerous. I shipped south from Colon to Cartagena on a small inter-island banana boat in 2006. They were smugglers and dumped two of us and our bikes into an open boat in the middle of the night (see Blog at home). As the great sage (and great friend) Ang-Wei Ming remarked. We said we wanted an adventure.
Ming got robbed by four kids with knives to his throat half a block from his down-town Colon hotel. I stayed out at the Harbor Inn next door to the Melia in what was the Canal zone. Reasonable price and safe.
Riding north last year, I shipped the bike from Cartagena on a yacht into Portobello. The crew was an alcoholic, turned off the motor in the middle of the night and lost the key!
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