Yesterday was a sea day filled with lots to do.  We finished our day at the Pinnacle Grill.  The menu has changed but the food hasn’t it is great.  They still have their signature lobster bisque, candied bacon and steaks!  We attended the captain’s reception last night. Our Captain is very talkative and is very informative.  Our previous captain did the reception in 15 minutes and this captain took over an hour and it was great !

Our port stop today with Puerto Limon (Costa Rica)   Our guide said that one of the first questions he gets from cruise ship tourists is how big the island is.  Costa Rica is a country on the continent of South America.

Today we booked the Caribbean Train Ride & Tortuguero Canal Boat Ride.  

The Caribbean Train was developed to help with the exportation of coffee, which was the primary exporting the 1870s.  Construction of the railway began in the 1807s and was completed in the 1890sl.  The construction was extremely challenging due to Costa Rica’s mountainous terrain, dense rainforests, and tropical diseases such as malaria and yellow fever.  Thousands of workers, many from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, were brought in to work on the project. Many lives were lost during construction due to harsh conditions and diseases. The railway was completed iconnecting San José to Puerto Limón.  After coffee, bananas became a primary export and the trains were used to move all of the exports from the interior of the country to the ports.

We had a great ride down the old track seeing old banana trees, wildlife and the ocean.  After finishing the train ride, we boarded the bus for a quick ride to one of the old canals and a boat ride.

The Tortuguero Canals, often referred to as the “Amazon of Costa Rica,” are an intricate network of natural and artificial waterways located along the northeastern Caribbean coast of Costa Rica, in the province of Limón. The Tortuguero area was originally shaped by geological and hydrological processes over thousands of years. The canals were formed by sedimentation from rivers flowing down from the central mountain ranges, which created a series of interconnected lagoons, rivers, and wetlands. In the 1940s and 1950s, canals were dug to create a more navigable route between rivers, lagoons, and the Caribbean Sea. These man-made additions were primarily intended to facilitate the transport of goods, particularly bananas and other agricultural products, from plantations to the coast for export. The construction connected the natural lagoons and rivers into what is now the Tortuguero Canal network, spanning over 70 kilometers.

We had a great boat ride down one of these canals, see a sloth, some kind of reptile, a Caiman crocodilus, a Howler Monkey, and several kinds of birds,

It was a very rainy day which made Nana happy and she was also happy that Holland America provided us with ponchos, a carrying bag, a backpack, a phone charger, and a hat;  We found these in our rooms last night after attending the captain’s reception.

Starting tomorrow we have two sea days before we get to Ecuador.  Tomorrow we pass through the Panama canal which will be very exciting.  Nana and I love canals.