Wilde Adventures

Incan Empire Cruise: November 3 — December 4, 2013

When we've been in Costa Rica before we've concentrated on coffee. This time we enjoyed the area around the Mangrove River.

What a delightful day we had! We’d dithered around for so long about what to do today; we love this port and there are so many choices, both as private tours and as shore excursions. Previously we’ve taken the entire day to go to San Jose to visit the Brit Coffee Plantation; Brit is our household coffee and we discovered it at a tasting in the terminal some years ago. While the tasting was separate from the ship, HAL had some relationship with them; the port shopping ambassador had forms for a very nice discount on a 20-bag order, shipping costs included and shipped to your home. We’ve been using it ever since. And, on another visit, we went out to the rainforest to enjoy the tram that goes up into the canopy and at the moment my laptop screensaver is a photograph of Costa Rican rainforest trees of a thousand shades of green, with four dear little monkeys lounging on their backs amongst the branches. When the photo was taken (in the rain, from an arial tram), all that was visible was a streak of brown but when magnified . . . magnificent! So we wanted to do something different this time and after looking at the private tour offerings and the shore excursions we selected an option that I only found in the shore excursions—a time on the river coupled with a train ride through the back country.It turned out to be an excellent decision.

There are separate pages in this blog about both the train trip and the Mangrove River cruise; they are in the menu bar under Puerto Caldera.

HAL Shore Excursions

Train and River tours