Three days cruising at sea that had concluded with us crossing the equator were followed by our first port of call in the northern hemisphere for this cruise and the first Central American country we’d ever be visiting, Costa Rica.
Puntarenas
Our port of call was Puntarenas and I’d just like to start by saying that I’m going to call the city and region Puntarenas and not Punta Arenas. Wikipedia agrees with me and says the former, as does a Costa Rican travel website, while Google and several other sites say both with the former being the region and the latter the city. That’s all kinds of confusing and doesn’t really tie in with how the place seemed to be pronounced by our guide during this day. Furthermore, there is already a Punta Arenas in Chile and if you follow that link you’ll see that we know this for a fact because we went there back in 2016. Having two places with the same name takes that already-present confusion and ratchets it up a notch into hella confusing territory and we’ve already got my writing on this site to perform that function. So, Puntarenas it is.
We started the day with tug boats helping to manoeuvre Star Princess into position on the pier jutting out from the peninsula that served as the city’s cruise port.
There wasn’t much in the way of clouds in the sky and what we could see tended to be distant and mostly over mountains that could be seen inland. Our first impressions of Puntarenas and Costa Rica in general based on views from the ship were positive ones but everything seemed so low to the ground. I can’t say for certain that I was expecting anything in particular but this flat, mostly green landscape that seemed like it was one high tide away from being washed away wasn’t it. Even the mountains felt small.
Costa Rica is probably most well-known for its coffee and its wildlife. We like coffee and we like wildlife and if you’re so inclined when you’re visiting the country on a cruise ship then you can easily find excursions that will take you off to see either or both of those things. As much as we like coffee and wildlife, though, they aren’t priorities for us when we’ve travelling somewhere new; we much prefer places of historical or cultural interest. For that reason we would be taking a Princess Cruises excursion to the country’s capital city, San José, to see a few buildings with historical significance.
With San José being a fair distance from Puntarenas this meant our excursion started not too long after the ship was cleared to disembark. The pier didn’t appear to be very wide as we made our way down the gangway onto it so it was a bit of a surprise to see buses parked up on it ahead of the ship’s bow. There was a little bit of confusion as several excursion groups merged together, trying to work out which bus everyone should be on. During a quick hunt ahead of the main pack to see if I could work out where our bus was and quite why nobody appeared to be moving, our tour stickers were spotted by a Princess representative who directed us to the first of two buses allocated to our group. Thus it was that we accidentally jumped a queue of about forty other passengers on our tour and, being British, this was both a horrifying thing to realise and also infinitely enjoyable to experience on account of its naughtiness. Not only that but we were directed to a mini-bus rather than a full-size one owing to the number of people who had signed up for this excursion, a fact which pleased me immensely as it meant fewer people to wait around for whenever we would need to return to the vehicle.
Since the mini-bus could only hold a limited number of passengers we didn’t have to wait around long before we were off towards San José, a journey due to take around ninety minutes. We got our first, unexpected taste of Costa Rica’s wildlife appeal as our bus pulled up at a set on traffic lights on the peninsula of which Puntarenas was a part when the driver attracted the attention of our guide who then pointed to our left and explained how iguanas were, you know, just a thing that you’d see in the cities there. I was quite surprised both by how fast the iguanas moved and how aggressive they were to one another.
Panamanian White-Faced Capuchin Monkeys
Our second, unexpected taste of Costa Rica’s wildlife occurred a little while after this. The bus suddenly started slowing and pulled over by the roadside behind several other buses that had done the same thing. Our guide then explained that the trees along the road here were inhabited by a troop of Panamanian White-Faced Capuchin Monkeys. Despite their name, the capuchins are indigenous to and spread across the forests of all of Central America. We eagerly got off, keen to see if we could spot our relatives and this proved to be a lot easier than we’d expected as the capuchins seemed keen to come and look at us too.
Of course, the reason that the capuchins were coming close was because they knew that they would be rewarded for entertaining us tourists and making our trip more memorable. Capuchin monkeys are omnivores with a diet that mostly consists of fruit and insects and our guide brought along some food for the animals which he started handing out to some of us from the bus so that we could offer it to the monkeys. I’m pleased to report – and I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear – that no insects were among the offerings.
With several buses present and several tour groups doing a similar thing the troop did well out of our visit but I have to confess to a little unease regarding these sorts of interactions with wildlife. I hope that the infrequency of tour buses heading along that particular stretch of road from Puntarenas towards San José means that this is simply an occasional treat for the capuchins and not something they become in any way dependent upon or something that affects their natural, social structures and interactions. Best thing in these situations is to assume that the locals know what they’re doing and not to impose any outsider, moralistic interpretations on something we just don’t know enough about, but it’s not easy.
Anyway, I got some lovely photos of a monkey up close because I wandered around to face a capuchin being fed. Quite what everyone else on our bus was doing taking photos of its backside is something only they know and about which I don’t want to think too much.
In the next cruise diary post I’ll cover the details of the excursion in San José itself with visits to a theatre, a museum, and a lovely lunch too.