Here is a great article that appeared in Vanity Fair that talks about travel to Panama and some of the more influential people and great places few know about here in Panama.
Shortly before noon on my last day in Panama I found myself tottering across the Miraflores Locks in hot pursuit of Stanley Motta. Stanley is a straight-talking, no-nonsense 67-year-old, a devoted family man, and, officially at least, Panama’s only billionaire, with interests in aviation, banking, property, insurance, and the duty-free business. Part of the furniture of the nation. This explains why we were tottering across the Miraflores Locks. Not any old billionaire gets to do that. Which is just as well, because the locks are about two feet wide, with a life-threatening drop off one side into a yawning steel chamber large enough to hold a 105-by-950-foot Panamax container ship. “If you fall, fall to the other side,” Stanley shouted over his shoulder. He was loving this. Lights were flashing, indicating that the locks were about to open. But Stanley wanted to show me the control tower in the middle and nobody was going to stop him. He was held in admiration, if not in reverence, by everyone to whom I mentioned his name. It was a stroke of good luck that allowed me to see Panamanian things, briefly, the other way round, through Stanley’s eyes. There, safe and sound in the library hush and air-conditioned cool of the control tower at the Miraflores Locks, I saw him grinning like a schoolboy at what must be one of the few things on the face of the Earth, apart perhaps from his grandchildren, that still renders him awestruck: the canal in action, a paradigm of efficiency and order.
“Doesn’t it blow your mind?” he said.
It did. It does. There would be no Panama without the canal. Punto. But it came at a price.