PUNTARENAS - COSTA RICA

We awoke to a Costa Rican morning & were very excited at the thought of walking through a rainforest

We left at 7:15am for our forest skywalk & Pura Vida garden tour with Ricardo our tour guide & Miguel, our erratic bus driver - we were driven through the outskirts of the town - homes that looked as if they should have been condemned, homes with bars across the front, garbage in the streets, not a very pretty sight :-(

We thought, being a tourist destination the town would be quite pretty, but that was not the case. 

The further we travelled the worse it got & once out of the residential area the roadside was littered with rubbish & the land was extremely dry & dusty. Ricardo explained it was the end of the dry season & the wet season would start in about 2 weeks, he also said most of the rivers are polluted, but were full of crocodiles -  so don't swimming

After travelling along an extremely dusty (slightly scary) dirt road we were dropped off to begin our skywalk - you can see from the below picture of Cliff just how dry the forest was. Maybe we had seen too many David Attenborough documentaries on the Costa Rican rainforests, so disappointment was an understatement. 

It did become greener the further we walked -  but still very dry.

We then went to privately owned botanical gardens. An American couple had bought the property 15 years ago & created these beautiful gardens which had great views of the coast.

We saw beautiful hummingbirds & colourful butterflies, but the highlight was seeing wild macaws, which was incredible - they were as noisy & crazy as the white cockatoos in Oz

After a nice lunch it was back on the bus for another stop. The river was quite pretty & we saw lots of iguanas

Back in town we wandered for a little while through markets then back on the ship to wash away the dust.

     

What can we say - Farewell Puntarenas,looking forward to a rest day at sea tomorrow - then it will be the Panama Canal.

Take care xxx