Panama Canal Cruise: Costa Rica

Our cruise started in Los Angeles. We usually fly in the night before whenever we fly in for a cruise because of how crazy things have been at airports lately. We've had great luck with United though for many of our more recent flights. The coast guard was doing an inspection so our boarding was delayed. BUT, things were very well organized and we were quickly taken aboard once they got clearance. It was a smaller ship so definitely less people but also less services, restaurants, etc. We stopped at two places in Mexico, Puerto Vallarta and Huatulco but since we had just cruised to Mexico recently, that wasn't a very thrilling part of a cruise for us.

Finally, we got someplace new in Costa Rica. Costa Rica was so interesting. We took a bus to get to a macaw sanctuary and along the way saw a lot of the locals out doing their thing. Motorcycles are very popular there for getting around and they drive pretty quick down there. Coffee dominates the scene along with bananas and pineapples. As we were told, the Costa Rican way is always sugar in coffee. We brought some home and it has an interesting somewhat fruity flavor. The sanctuary was a fairly typical, fenced in animals kind of place but with a few surprises. We did see a ton of macaws in a variety of colors which are beautiful birds. They also had some other bird species and even a couple of jaguars. They all seemed well fed and healthy so they must know what they're doing there. The fun part was finding the many critters that lived outside of the fenced in areas. There were a few stray macaws to be sure but we were very pleasantly surprised by seeing a few monkeys and sloths not to mention lizards everywhere. I'm not sure who stole the show, the baby monkeys were adorable but so were the sloths and I was amazed at how long their claws were. The end result is that we wandered around with our heads up most of the time scanning the trees for wildlife instead of looking at the macaws.

After the macaw sanctuary, we got on a small boat to go out into the mangroves. Unfortunately, it was low tide so we couldn't go as far out as we would have liked. It was very relaxing being out on a boat but as soon as we started seeing wildlife the whole atmosphere changed to one of frenzied scanning of the trees looking for iguanas, monkeys and several types of birds. The mangroves themselves are pretty interesting though I'll be honest, I was so busy looking for birds and critters that I missed a lot of what they were saying about them. Out in the mangroves, the monkeys don't stick around much so it was hard to spot them and get in some photos before they'd run off. Mostly we saw white-faced cappuchins along with the iguanas, herons and omni-present frigate birds. I could have stayed out there for hours because of how much I love being out on the water and because of the interesting things we saw. Back on the bus, off to a little shopping and back on the ship we went before heading out to our next port, Panama!