Sunday 26th January

Up at 5:50am Limon still a distant dot on the horizon showered, shaved and up for breakfast in record breaking time. Whilst enjoying a full English we watched as the officer of the watch turned the ship round performing a perfect 180 degree pirouette in the centre of the tiny Limon harbour with Celebrity Equinox impatiently waiting to follow us in. Both ships will discharge a total of over 4,000 passengers onto the small town. We make our way down to the theatre for the start of our tour, arriving ten minutes late 7:10 and having been given our little sticky badges (no. 4) we sat and waited a further 20 minutes whilst gangway are put in place and other procedures are gone through etc. etc. By 7:45 we were all packed into our coach and on our way. The temperature is already 23°c and humidity close to 100% Our guide Leonardo tells us that there are ten different habitats in Costa Rica, but we won’t be seeing all of them. We are heading for the tropical rain forests, mangroves and lagoons. As we travel along the shore road we see black rocks on the surf which we are informed is coral that previously was under water. It is now nine inches out of the water following an earthquake in 1990/91. We are then told that Costa Rica has about a hundred tremors a day most of which you can’t feel, but with all this geothermal activity going on underground there are 112 volcanoes 80 of which are still active. Not to worry we are going to see birds and butterflies 900 species of the former and 15,000 species of the latter, though we won’t see them all. Thank goodness for that we’d be here all year. Leonardo is none stop in his delivery of facts about Costa Rica, suffice to say that banana crop is the main export followed by pineapple, coffee, sugar and palm oil. But he assures us that the banana is not the real thing, it is a hybrid bred for the demands of the western supermarket and he then produces a carrier bag from which he pulls ‘real bananas’ all of two inches long and tasting delicious. We all had some and they really were nice a sort of delicate banana flavour and sweeter than the supermarket model and less floury.

After a short drive we pull up alongside a train with steps up to an open ended carriage like in the old fashioned cowboy films. Air conditioning was the same as the energy efficient air conditioning on that bus in Aruba – a complete absence of windows. We were warned not to put our heads or hands out of the window as they could be sliced off by the undergrowth and he wasn’t joking. There was to be no commentary whilst the train was moving, because he could not make himself heard over the noise. Rickety was an understatement. As we lurched and trundled along with branches attempting to snatch us out of the carriage, we noticed we could see the track between the floorboards.

The forest was dense and even if you had wanted to get out and walk there was no space between the trees. When we looked down onto the forest we could see black, brackish water glinting in what little sunlight that penetrated. Goodness knows what horrors lurked there. We were beginning to enjoy our trip when we suddenly ground to halt with lots of excite shouting in Spanish from our guides. They had spotted a three toed Sloth. The train reversed up a little and there it was, just hanging around, as three toed Sloths do. It doesn’t look a comfortable existence at all but he seemed happy enough from what we could see, he didn’t do much, but then Sloths don’t do they. Further up the track we screeched to a halt again accompanied by more excited chatter. The guides had spotted some spider monkeys, the train positioned itself so that we could see them all and then the guides started calling in monkey language to encourage them down, but they were having none of it and just stared down at us with that bored monkey expression and scratched their… well they scratched. We had to get moving and off we went again staring at the butterflies and brightly coloured birds. One that shot by us was jet black with the brightest red breast I have ever seen.

Soon we were seeing the waves crashing on the beach through the trees on the right and we travelled along for a few miles with forest to the left and the ocean to the right, before coming to the region where banana plantations began to appear on both sides of the train. Banana trees grow to maturity in six months, produce a full stem of bananas three months later and then die. Each bunch of bananas is covered by a plus plastic bag and Leonardo asked for suggestions as to why this may be. There were several, I ventured that it meant they were pre-packed by the time they were ready for picking. Leonardo’s look was all that was required to indicate the absurdity of that remark. It turns out that there are several reasons, they create an even micro climate, the bag protects against the sun and so ensures an even ripening of all the fruit at the same time. Without the bag the top bananas would ripen first in the sun and by the time the bottom bananas had ripened the top ones would have withered and they protect against insects & spraying. And why blue, because black would mean that the temperature would be too high inside the bag and red is nature’s warning signal that would deter beneficial insects. I forgot the reason against yellow, it was a long day. It’s a great climate for bananas apparently, because Limon is in the tropical rain belt and in close proximity to the equator the temperate is even all the year round (28°/32° degrees). Perfect for banana growing, I now know why they don’t grow bananas in Accrington.

Anyway by now we were nearing the mangrove that we were to tour by boat but before that we stopped for a selection of fresh fruits and a bottle or two of local Costa Rican beer. The fruit was great, trays and trays of it freshly cut into bite size pieces. The beer (lager) was, well lager. Those of you who know me will be aware of the speed at which I can down an IPA. I had barely drunk an inch of my beer (lager) when we were told the boat was ready. So I snuck my glass on the boat (even if it is lager, I wasn’t going to leave it and it lasted the whole two hours).

Before we cast off we were told that the crocodiles were a cosmopolitan bunch and they loved the variety foreign tourists bought them, so to keep our hands out of the water. I had no intention of putting anything of mine in the water before the warning and certainly not now, anyway I was holding my beer (lager) with one hand and my camera with the other. We castoff and had hardly gone a hundred yards before we screeched (as best a boat can screech) to a halt. Leonardo had spotted a Little Blue Heron, a beautifully formed miniature Heron with a body about the size of a starling but the colour Wedgwood blue, with feathers so fine it didn’t seem to have them. Further down the same manoeuvre was performed and we looked up to where Leonardo was pointing excitedly and saw nothing. “There! There! there!” he shouted, where? where? where? we all thought as we stared up into the canopy, all l could see was tree branches. Then like one of those weird pictures that if you stare at long enough suddenly transforms to a landscape, we saw it only twenty or so feet away, a massive Green Iguana. We only spotted it because it moved to eat a leaf. It looked big enough to bite your head off, I instinctively drew back, as I was aware that in my eagerness to spot it I had stretched my neck out somewhat and did not want to look like a tasty morsel. After a lot of camera clicks and ooh’s and aah’s we continued on our way through the dangling creepers, stopping every few yards it seemed, each time Leonardo had spotted something new and most of the times we had to look hard to see whatever it was until we saw it and then we couldn’t believe we had missed it. Something’s like the little birds that constantly buzzed the boat were easy to see, but when we asked what they were, Leonardo dismissed them with a wave of his hand, just mangrove swallows he sniffed. Typical the one thing we could see and they were barely worth a mention. Another excited halt and we could see, just hanging around, a Sloth. Oh! another Sloth we said (feeling quite the experts) we were soon put right. This is a one toed Sloth, Leonardo informed us. The other one was a three toed Sloth, suitably chastened we all pretended we knew that and it was the others who didn’t. I toyed with the idea of asking him if there was a two, four and five toed Sloth but after the episode with the blue plastic bag, I didn’t. And so it went on the Yellow Crowned Red Eyed Heron, the Brazilian Long Nosed Bat (no! I’m not making these up), the Snowy Egret with yellow toes that it wiggles in the water so that fish think it’s a worm, when the fish swim up to grab them, they get grabbed. Bit risky I thought after what they had told us about the crocodiles, perhaps crocodiles only eat tourists and wildebeest (or am I getting my continents mixed up). It didn’t seem long at all before we were on our way back, but not before our boat driver had rammed the bank tied up and shot into the jungle. We thought he’d gone for a Jimmy, but it turned out he’d heard the call of the Blue Jeaned Frog, I thought this was a stylish Frenchman, or a euphemism girls used for drunken sailors who try to pick them up, but it turns out that the Blue Jeaned Frog is a deadly frog that can kill a man just by looking at them (my mother-in-law can do that). It is bright red with blue legs, and our intrepid coxswain comes out of the jungle proudly carrying one on a leaf. Phew! we all took pictures, I took one over Carol’s shoulder, reasoning that it was men that these frogs kill not women. Apparently they get their poison by eating poisonous ants, digesting the ant and storing the ant’s venom. Nice, some of these creatures. After we had all taken a picture the coxswain passed the frog to another boat that had pulled up to see what all the excitement was about. Their guide was passing a picture of the frog round her passengers and was a bit squeamish about taking the real thing. Don’t worry luv I thought it’s a man killer, you’ll be OK.

So with that excitement over with, we hurtled back to our jetty at an exhilarating speed, as whilst the Blue Jeaned Frog had not killed anyone, it had delayed us.

Leonardo told us on the coach back to the ship that we had only seen a fraction of what Costa Rica had to offer and that if we spent a fortnight there we would see as many different species each day. It was a good pitch and we are going to see some more in a couple of days or so. I will let you know if what he said is true. But it was a great day out.