Panama City

Panama City is the only capital where you can watch a container ship glide past the skyline at breakfast and hear howler monkeys in a rainforest park before lunch. The isthmus made her a hinge of the world twice — first for Spanish gold, then for the Canal — and she wears both fortunes: a colonial casco on one point of the bay, a wall of glass towers on the other.

The sensible traveller starts at Miraflores to watch the locks lift a ship like a bathtub toy; walks the Casco Viejo at golden hour among balconies, plazas and rooftop bars; and keeps a morning for the Metropolitan Park or the Amador causeway, where the city proves that jungle and skyline can share a postcard. The seafood market's ceviche closes any argument.

The Guide's honesty: the heat is a schedule, not a surprise — walk early, museum at noon, casco at dusk —; taxis negotiate before moving, apps don't; and the Canal is genuinely worth the cliché: go anyway, and go early, when the big transits stack up and the guides still have their voices.