Undoubtedly one who should order the same variety of dishes in a city restaurant in the States would have to pay more than fifty cents, although there are country hotels in which equal variety and excellence for the price are not unattainable. A typical dinner menu includes soup, two kinds of meat, four kinds of vegetables, hot rolls or light bread, a salad, tea, coffee, or cocoa and for dessert pie or ice cream. The Isthmian appetite for ice cream is a truly tropical wonder. In the early days of the work the novice on the Isthmus was likely to mistake an open bowl of quinine on the table for pulverized sugar, but this has very generally disappeared.
AT LOS ANGOSTURAS
Some Panama rivers flow through dales like those of the Wisconsin
No money changes hands at the Commission hotels, unless the diner happens to be a non-employee. Meals are paid for by coupons from books purchased at the Commissary. By omitting the luncheon, and filling its place with a little fruit, or a sandwich, the Canal employee can make his food cost only $18 a month. He has no lodging to pay; clothes are the cheapest imaginable, for there are no seasons to provide for, nor any rotations of fashions to be observed; theaters are practically non-existent and away from Panama City temptation to riotous living are slight. The Zone worker is the most solvent individual in all industry and ought to close up a four or five years’ service with a comfortable nest egg.
The economy and comfort of life on the Canal Zone are mainly due to the Commissary system which has grown up under the American régime. This is part of the Subsistence Department, which is divided into two branches—hotel and commissary. The hotel department not only runs the Commission hotels already described, but the two large hotels patronized by tourists—the Tivoli at Ancon and the Washington at Colon. Though a special rate is made at these two hotels for employees, their prices are still too high for them to be patronized by any except the most highly paid workers. Even the pleasure seeker on the Isthmus is likely to regard their rates as rather exorbitant.
THE WATER FRONT AT COLON
Cocoanut palms are picturesque but beware of the falling nuts
Their prices, however, are essentially those of the native Panamanian hotels in the city, and in cleanliness they are vastly superior. The visitor to Panama, however, who seeks local color or native food need not expect to find either at the Tivoli. That is a typical resort hotel which might have been moved down to the Isthmus from the Jersey beaches or Saratoga Springs. Its only local color resides in its Jamaica waiters, and as I am assured that they are no less a trial to the managers than to the guests, criticism would be perhaps ungenerous. As for native fruits and food, you must go away from the hotel to seek them. An infrequent papaya appears on the menu, but for the mamei, mango, sapodilla and other fruits, the guests at the time of my visit sought the native fruit stores.
Photo by Underwood & Underwood