We began our 3 day tour of Tortuguero National Park. We started with an early morning 5 hour bus trip and then a 1 hour boat trip to the canals along the Caribean on the North East coast of Costa Rica. We saw crocodiles basking in the sun of the river banks. The small country of Cost Rica has 112 volcanoes and 5 are active. We were lucky to see Volcano Irazu spewing steam this morning. Tortuguero is a very remote area with a series of rivers and canals. It is...

We headed to San Jose this morning arriving late morning. It was a 3 hour drive. There were many Palm Oil trees as we left and actually saw oxen hitched to a wagon working the fields. We also stopped at a river bridge by Jaco Beach and saw 23 crocodile sunning themselves. We turned the car back in and the remaining few days will be with a tour. The driving is very interesting here to say the least. This afternoon we took a tour of the Britt Coffee company. ...

The Howler Monkeys begin "howling" at about 5:00 AM and continue for about an hour. It is very loud and constant and I went out on our deck just to listen. We have been starting out every morning with big Costa Rican breakfasts. It always includes lots of fruit, beans and rice, and fried plantains with the other traditional foods. There is an abundance of papaya, pineapple, bananas,and watermelon. We visited a butterfly observatory this morning. There are qu...

Today we visited Manuel Antonio National Park. This park has 3 major trails with opportunity to see wildlife. We saw several 3 Toed Sloths which are very interesting animals that are quite large and pretty ugly. The park has lots of White Faced monkeys. They actually came very close looking for food. The park has the best beaches in Manuel Antonio. They are the best for swimming that we have had in Costa Rica. Very soft sand and very warm water. The temps...

We were fortunate that the weather had cleared and we began our day with an early morning hike to the waterfalls. We were the only ones on the trail which made it fun. Not long into the hike we saw a tarantula right on the trail. It was approximately 6 - 7 inches in diameter and very impressive looking. The waterfalls were spectacular and we were able to get very close. When we returned we were able to feed the hummingbirds out of our hands. There were so ma...