From Panama we sailed to Costa Rica for our first real day on the cruise. Way back before the turn the century, when I was a young whippersnapper, I spent 6 weeks in Costa Rica as part of a 4-H exchange program. We did about a week of prep work as a group, then I spent 3 weeks with a host family, and then we traveled as a group again for a week or so. I haven’t been back since then. Costa Rica is great but one of the things that I really remember is that the worst part we visited was the area around Limon in the northeast part.
Guess where the cruise ship was stopping? Yeah, Limon. I’m really glad I’d been to Costa Rica before or I’d be wondering what everyone is always going on about how Costa Rica is so beautiful. The husband has never been and he was confused.
One thing I really don’t like about ocean cruises is that you often can’t get anywhere from the port. On river cruises you are docked in the middle of a city. You wander off the boat and walk to wherever you want to go. Ocean ports are far away from everything. I always feel like you don’t get to see much. That was the case here. There is a little market for buying souvenirs. You can walk out into town but there isn’t really much to do.
We had one excursion booked. It was the included one for the day. It took us to a park. Our guide got on the bus and introduced himself by saying that his name was Allen and he spoke English because of 4-H. It turns out that he was in a similar program to the one that I was in but his was longer. I was excited and we had to have 4-H bonding time during one break.
He was a very good nature guide. He really liked birds. They stopped the bus on the side of the road to look at this caracara.
I got all excited because I had read a book about them. I’d never heard of them before that. I was considering this day already a win just for that sighting.
Then we went to this little canal and got on boats. I guess it is an extensive canal network that used to be used for timbering but now it is for showing wildlife to tourists. We only went on a tiny section but we saw some good animals.
There were crocodiles and caimans.
A trio of herons – Little Blue, Green, and Yellow headed night heron. I’ve been looking to find a green heron in a park around here but had to travel thousands of miles to actually see one.
A well camouflaged basilisk
The star of the show was a brown throated three fingered sloth just hanging alongside the canal.
This wasn’t a zoo. These were all free roaming animals who just liked this area.
On the way back the bus stopped to show off some banana flowers in different stages.
So even though this isn’t my favorite part of Costa Rica, I was happy with all the animals. I never saw a sloth when I was there for six weeks.
I think the people at the cruise port were pretty disappointed with us though. Our ship is small. It only has 900 passengers which is tiny compared to most cruise ships which carry thousands. So we weren’t giving them much business and we were the only ship there that day.
There was a little band that played the whole day. By the end of the day when people were going to back to the ship they were narrating people walking away. It was things like, “Ok, goodbye now. See you later.” They must have been really bored.
The next day was a sailing day as we headed towards Roatan Honduras.
