National Geographic Sea Lion

Here's a pic from last Saturday as we were boarding. Our room is ready, and I am getting out our passports. Lindblad Expeditions/National Geographic do a fine job on the National Geographic Sea Lion cruise. From our dock, we are about to cruise down the coast of Costa Rica, visit some islands in Panama and go through the Panama Canal. As you can see, I've got the right had on, at least for now!

Saturday, a travel day

(Most of these posts are a week delay from the activity as we had limited access on the boat). Please see previous posts for some additional updates including some pics recently added.

On the Pan American Highway headiing south towards our ship.

Monteverde was beautiful and amazing. Shoul be a part of any extended trip to Costa Rica as should Tabacon near the Arenal volcano which we visited on an earlier trip. (Tabacon is a Leading Hotels of the World resort. It bills its

elf as a grand spa and thermal resort which it definitely is. Check out the exotic heated pools, natural, heated by the Arenal Volcano. This place is as beautiful as the web site in

dicates and you can go for a day visit too.)

We did a couple of tour things in a

ddition to the cloud forest visiting bats and butterflies, both of which contribute to biodiversity in ways I never imagined. In fact, Costa Rica's reason for being seems to be biodiversity. This country has no army. They understand clearly their place in the world ecosystem and protect their land, watersheds, etc. There are a lot of federal initiatives that encourage the setting aside of reserves, in addition to many national parks. In the next several days we'll be visiting many of these lo

cations along the Pacific Coast. As I wrote this, we were headed towards out ship, the National Geographic Sea Lion, which only holds about 60 guests.

But first, a few more pictures from MonteVerde:

The first is the face of a three toed sloth.

This was a rare sighting, rare in that they are almost always curled up and you cannot see their faces. This was taken at from the world famous MonteVerde sky bridges, the first of their kind in Central America.

The next two pictures are for Karen and I on the sky bridges. I talked the other day about the constant horizontal rain in the cloud forest from the clouds. Well, on this day, we had horizontal AND vertical rain, sometimes quite heavy. The animals were all huddled up under the leaves, and we were bundled up pretty well. The people who did not read the literature about gear and came unprepared were pretty unhappy this day. But it was still wonderful, with five sky bridges through the canopy, seeing the orchids and other tree top plants as well as the sloth and a family of howler monkeys from above.