PANAMA CITY, Sept. 27 (Xinhua) -- The newly expanded Panama Canal said on Wednesday it expected some 235 cruise ships to cross the larger waterway this winter high season.
The canal's 2017-2018 cruise season will officially kick off on Oct. 2 with the Island Princess, the first cruise ship to include voyages through the larger locks on its regular itinerary, the Panama Canal Authority (ACP) said in a statement.
A larger canal with bigger locks were built to accommodate today's neopanamax ships -- behemoth container carriers named after the expanded waterway that connects the Pacific and Atlantic oceans -- and inaugurated in June 2016.
The Island Princess' 19-day itinerary begins in the U.S. city of Los Angeles, California, then continues down the west coast towards Central America, visiting ports in Mexico, Guatemala and Nicaragua before returning to its home port of Los Angeles.
The biggest cruise ship expected to cross the expanded canal will be the Norwegian Bliss, currently under construction and designed to carry some 4,200 passengers, according to the Panama Canal's International Trade Specialist Albano Aguilar.
On Tuesday, the expanded canal welcomed the 2,000th neopanamax ship, which was a Chinese cargo carrier that operates between Asia and the Caribbean.
"The COSCO Yantian container ship completed the milestone transit through the expanded canal traveling northbound from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean," the ACP said.
