A place with a vast, underpopulated Caribbean coastal hinterland and a narrow, populated stretch that lies between two lakes and the Pacific Ocean. A country one and a half times the land mass of Scotland, yet we’ll cycle its length in just five days, a distance no greater than travelling from Edinburgh to Inverness. It’s a disconcerting experience to realise just how small this necklace of countries is, and yet they have been names in my modern history. Countries that have a larger than life history, that to my imagination should be much bigger. Places with part-understood associations: Monroe Doctrine, and IranContra, Somoza and Sandinista, Oliver North and General Noriega, ‘banana republics’ and Chiquita Dole, Dollar diplomacy and Cold-wars, all in the hot-tropics.

I’m scanning a guidebook when I come on this stated fact: Granada was the colonial Spanish’s ‘Atlantic port’ and ‘the oldest’ city in the Western Hemisphere. Two things initially struck me, as so often does when the words ‘Europeans’ and ‘discovered’ appear in the same sentence; weren’t all those Mayan, Aztecan, Zapotecan ruins not originally vast centres of cultural wealth when places like London, Paris and Toledo were squalid little villages? It’s an old trope, much chewed over, but what intrigued me more was the ‘Atlantic port’ report.

Granada lies on Lake Nicaragua, a vast body of water, (13 times greater than all of Scotland’s freshwater lochs), but is a mere twenty kilometres from the Pacific coast. It’s worth looking at a map just to confirm and digest such an incongruous fact; the same map will explain why.

The Río San Juan flows east out of the lake, all the way to the Caribbean Sea, which is, de facto, the Atlantic Ocean and a direct sailing back to the Spanish Crown. It’s the route taken by all that phenomenal silver wealth that was extracted out of Peru. Much the same route was also used by the east coast 49ers heading for another commodities bonanza, the Californian gold rush. A long way round, but quicker, safer than the direct land route. Another neat reminder to my terra-centric mind, that once, historically, the connectivity of place was by blue water rather than by blue motorway. Something that a long distance sea-based navigator would better comprehend that an tar-based long distance cyclist.

All of which begs the obvious question: why is the Panama Canal in Panama?
For an answer, pick any or all of the following: USA Commercial Politics.