Panama Canal (partial) excursions

[jrobinso]

I am doing a 10 day Panama Canal cruise October.(Coral Princess) If you book a ship sponsored excursion you will exit the ship in Gatun Lake, do your excursion , and then reboard the ship in Colon. My question is what do you do to kill time until the ship returns to pick you up? The excursion we are interested in lasts 5 hours and returns around noon. It looks like our ship arrives in Colon at 5pm. If you have done this I would appreciate your input.

 

Thank so much.

[BillB48]

What excursion are you planning... as some easily run over their estimated times? I think the earliest you would be off the ship is 9AM to begin your tour and that would be under the quickest of circumstances. As you might expect the 5PM ship arrival at Colon is on the late side of what would be a "normal" arrival time. I think you would probably tender off the ship somewhere between 9 and 10 with the tour concluding at the pier in Colon around 3 ish. There is a shopping mall associated with the pier and it is safe to explore the mall shops. Of course there are many things that can interfere with the scheduling of the timing of events at the Canal, so it is always possible everything could go south... and in the case of the Canal even north:D!

[jrobinso]

What excursion are you planning... as some easily run over their estimated times? I think the earliest you would be off the ship is 9AM to begin your tour and that would be under the quickest of circumstances. As you might expect the 5PM ship arrival at Colon is on the late side of what would be a "normal" arrival time. I think you would probably tender off the ship somewhere between 9 and 10 with the tour concluding at the pier in Colon around 3 ish. There is a shopping mall associated with the pier and it is safe to explore the mall shops. Of course there are many things that can interfere with the scheduling of the timing of events at the Canal, so it is always possible everything could go south... and in the case of the Canal even north:D!

 

Thank you. We have booked the Gatun lake cruise Gatun locks and Embera. The Personalizer lists the excursion as 5 hours departing at 7am. Sounds like that departure time may be an error.

[Jetswdo]

After reading numerous information regarding after shore excursions are finished, we decided to just stay aboard the ship. Apparently you can't board the ship until close to 5:00? or so. Which works out fine I guess if you take a longer excursion. But for the shorter excursions, many of which end around 3:00 or so, you are forced to hang out around the pier in Colon, until ship allows you to board. Remember ship starts in Gatun Lake and arrives to pick up passengers from their excursions in Colon. We were considering the monkey cruise around Gatun Lake because I can only handle shorter excursions if severe humidity and heat- but we decided not to, due to reason above. One couple who booked the excursion we were interested in, said in their review that "if they knew they would have to wait a couple of hours" at the pier, they never would have booked it.

[JimAOk1945]

We did the Partial Transit last December over Christmas week on the Island Princess. We decided to stay aboard when the ship reached Gatun Lake and had a very nice day just walking around the ship throughout the day watching all the activities and taking pictures from various vantage points around the ship.

 

When the ship docked at Colon, we went ashore and did some window shopping and bought a few trinkets at the shopping area near the ship.

 

Here is a link to the section of my wife's website where she posted slide shows she made from the pictures she took on our cruise. You will notice there are slide shows for each port of call and the ship as well.

 

Panama Canal Partial Transit Cruise December 2014

 

If you want to see only the slide show for Colon, click on this link

 

Colon, Panama Sail in and Window Shopping

 

Happy cruising. It's a great way to travel!

[TW6cruiser]

We did this cruise last October. All of the excursions on the Canal day are listed as leaving the ship in the morning. Really, they are staggered. It all depends upon what time the ship finishes going through the first set of locks. They give you an idea the night before as to when your excursion will leave (i.e., the longest ones get off first) but they end up making announcements the morning of to tell people when their group leaves the ship. We took a shorter excursion (the expansion center and Gatun locks visitor center) and really enjoyed it. After the ship entered Gatun lake, we had time for breakfast in the buffet until our group left. We were one of the last groups off the ship. At the end of the day, we did have to wait about 1 hr. 45 minutes in Colon which was not fun. There are just a few local shops in one area and it made for a long day. I was still glad we took the excursion though.