Day ten — an early walk, the Sunday ciclovía, a market full of pineapples, and the canal at last

Kent’s early morning — Cinta Costera, Chinatown arch, and the market

I walked to the Metro station at 6:15am, carrying my usual optimism, and found the gates closed. A quick check of the Metro website confirmed it: Sunday service doesn’t start until 7am. I was faced with two options: walk to Tim Hortons and wait 45 minutes like a sensible person, or start walking toward old town in the Sunday morning cool. I started walking. This is a pattern.

Casa Blanca — the Alianza Française de Panamá. One of the buildings you pass on the walk toward old town that makes the route considerably more pleasant than it might otherwise be.

The route took me past the Riba Smith near the hotel — familiar territory — and then through a stretch of condos and commercial buildings that gradually gave way to government offices and embassy buildings as I approached downtown. The character of the street shifts noticeably on that walk. So does the number of people sleeping rough in doorways and on benches. I want to name that directly: I noticed it, and my first reaction was the kind of discomfort that comes from too many years of American cities where visible poverty is either invisible by design or actively policed. In Panama it was simply there, in a neighborhood I was walking through, and nobody was bothering anybody. A useful reminder that my discomfort was mine to work through, not a signal that anything was wrong.

I took a left toward the Cinta Costera — the coastal greenbelt running between Avenida Balboa and Panama Bay — and emerged from the building canyons into one of the better surprises of the whole trip.

The Sunday ciclovía — every week, no car in sight

The Cinta Costera on a Sunday morning — six lanes of Avenida Balboa given entirely to cyclists, joggers, walkers, rollerbladers, and people doing absolutely nothing in particular by the water. Every week, 6am to noon.

Avenida Balboa — normally a six-lane highway running along the waterfront — was completely closed to cars. In its place: hundreds of people cycling, jogging, walking, rollerblading, doing yoga in small groups, families with children on small bikes, older couples holding hands walking at the edge of the bay. This is not a special event. Every Sunday morning from 6am to noon, the city closes a full lane of Avenida Balboa and the Cinta Costera becomes what urban planners call a ciclovía — the road returned to people, at least for a morning.

It was one of the most genuinely wholesome things I’ve witnessed in a long time. Panama City is a fast, modern, ambitious city. On Sunday mornings, at least on the waterfront, it slows down and gives itself permission to just be. Free bike rentals are sometimes available at the north end if you get there early enough. Exercise classes run along the route. Juice vendors set up near the Panama sign.

Obligatory Panama sign photo. The Cinta Costera’s most visited photo stop, on a Sunday morning with no cars anywhere on the highway behind it. A completely different experience from any other day of the week.

Chinatown — what remains

The Chinatown arch — what remains of a community that shaped a significant part of Panama City’s identity and commercial history. The neighborhood itself is long gone; the arch stays.

Continuing past the fish market — past, not through, I have learned — I reached the decorative arch that marks what was once Panama City’s Chinatown. The Chinese community has been part of Panama since the construction of the transcontinental railroad in the 1850s, when tens of thousands of Chinese laborers came to work. The community grew, established a neighborhood, and shaped the city’s food, commerce, and culture in ways that are still visible. The neighborhood itself is gone now, absorbed into the surrounding urban fabric. The arch stays, marking a space that no longer exists as a place but hasn’t been entirely forgotten either.

Mercado San Felipe Neri — the produce market

The produce section at Mercado San Felipe Neri — pineapples, citrus, peppers, squash, beans, spices. The kind of market that makes you want to have a kitchen to cook in immediately.

I entered the market from the meat section. First thing: air conditioning. Unexpected and very welcome. At this hour — early Sunday morning — roughly half the stalls were open, but every single one of them, open or closed, was spotless. The scent of bleach in the air is not romantic, but in a market context it is deeply reassuring. Everything was fresh, well-presented, and clearly taken seriously by the people running it.

The meat section carried everything, and I mean everything, that is not from the sea. Every part of every animal, without the grocery store’s habit of trimming and packaging things into comfortable anonymity. It is a proper market, not a performance of one. There is no waste here. I find that genuinely admirable.

From there into the produce section, which was the reason I’d walked forty-five minutes to get here. Stalls overflowing with fruit and vegetables in a way that supermarket produce sections simply cannot replicate: golden pineapples, vivid peppers in green and red, citrus that looked actually juicy, multiple varieties of squash, onions, potatoes, beans. Several stalls were selling spice blends in zip-lock bags — cumin, achiote, dried chilies, things I couldn’t identify but wanted to. The whole section had a warmth to it, a mix of sweet ripeness and earthy spice that filled the air in layers.

I stopped in front of a pineapple display and stood there longer than was strictly necessary. We’ve been eating a lot of pineapple this trip and for good reason — Panamanian pineapples smell the way pineapple is supposed to smell. You know the kind. You can detect a perfectly ripe one from three stalls away. That’s what this was.

I could not smell the cilantro from that far away, which was fine with me. I cannot eat it.

I walked back out along the Cinta Costera, went a bit further out over the water to catch the skyline from across the harbor, and then took the Metro home from near Casco Viejo to meet Brian for breakfast.

The Panama City skyline from the water side of the Cinta Costera. More than anywhere else on this trip, this view reminds you that you are in a genuinely significant city.