It’s a palindrome… get it? Get it?! But the Panama Canal is so
much more than fodder for witty word games – it’s a grand feat
of engineering! Man vs. nature! Boys digging holes! A human
intervention in sustainability (more on that later)… Or more
specifically, a 77km ship canal in Panama that joins the
Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. Built between 1904 and
1914, traffic once consisted of approximately 1000 ships
annually, and has since increased to over 14,000 ships per year.
Wowsers. At the tolls they’re paying, that’s a lot of dinero
(average $54,000 USD) . Originally conceived by the French, the
first attempt to build the canal in 1880 failed after workers
succumbed to malaria and yellow fever (lowly paid immigrant
labour of course). The United States picked up the project in
the 20th Century and managed to score a sweet little deal where
they maintained ownership and control (obvi), of the most
lucrative shipping passage in the world. It wasn’t until the
1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties that a framework