It is Sunday so it must be Puerto Vallarta.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

It is Sunday so it must be Puerto Vallarta.

Today is our last Mexico stop and last chance to speak Spanish. We arrived at the port and were treated to a perfect view of the PV triathalon. We had a great view of the swimming part of this event from our decks on the ship and watched as these athletes swam the long course and then ran to their bikes for that part of the race. We were tired just watching them!

We decided to take the city bus down to our favorite area of PV, the old city. Since it was early on a Sunday morning, many of the shops were closed but we still had fun wandering throughout the downtown for a couple of hours. We were in search of another Mexican ceramic sunshine to add to our collection displayed in our home. We found one that we do not have yet. We have purchased one of these on every trip to Mexico and have about 25 of them displayed and surprisingly we have never bought a duplicate.

We stopped at Sr. Frogs for a cool drink and then found a city bus heading back the 6 miles toward the ship. The bus fare was just 8 pesos (about 75 cents), a lot better than the taxi prices of around $20. Riding the city buses is always an adventure but this time it was a slow adventure coming back to the ship as only a few lanes of traffic were open due to the triathalon bicyclists in the middle two lanes. It usually takes about 20 minutes to travel by bus from downtown but this time it took about over an hour. We got a chance to get a rear end massage on the bus as it slowly rode over the cobblestones J

We went back out to check our email and post this blog entry as we will be at sea for two days now so internet will not be available to us. We will be busy with shows for the next couple of days and will not be in port until Wed. when we dock in San Diego.

Adios to Mexico until our next trip.

Manzanillo, Mexico

a view of the city from our ship

Saturday, April 27, 2013

Manzanillo, Mexico

We have always enjoyed your visits to this charming port city and today was no exception.  Manzanillo has built a new cruise port since our last visit a few years ago and it makes access to the central part of the city quite convenient.

Manzanillo is a charming city located on several peninsulas and isthmuses with picturesque homes winding their way up the city’s steep hillsides. We spent several hours strolling the streets of this town and picked up a few odds and ends, but purchased no souvenirs.  Unlike our experiences on a few of our previous trips to this city, we did not get lost even once!

The city is also the Pacific home of Mexico’s navy and we witnessed their operations during the heavy ship traffic in this busy port. 

If you want to see what a Mexican city is like, free of the pressure of tourist schlock, try Manzanillo.

At Sea off the Pacific Coast of Central Mexico.

Friday, April 26, 2013

At Sea off the Pacific Coast of Central Mexico.

Today was the first sea day of our voyage.

Since Holland-America hired is to present on sea days, this was also our first lecture.

Our program, titled Life on a Square Rigger is always popular and this was well attended.  We had the Showtime at Sea theater. It makes for a comfortable presentation as we can see the audience and interact with them.  Since the show, we have continued to received nice comments from the passengers and crew.

Thursday, April 25th
Bienvenidos a Huatalco Mexico

We are

now in Mexico and we have been in this charming port before so we decided not to go on a tour and just stay in the port area. The temperature in in the mid 90's and very humid so we wanted to go to the beach for a swim. We got ready to get in the water but were warned of stinging jelly fish so we went back to the ship and took a swim in one of the pools.
This is a Holland America older ship but very nice and only 1200 passengers. Tomorrow is our first presentation so we are excited about that. We then head to Manzanillo and PV and then Sand Diego and Victoria and Vancouver BC. We have 6 shows to present before Vancouver so we will be busy but that is what we love to do on board.
Hope all of you are well and enjoying our blog.
Adios.

Puerto Chiapas, Mexico

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Bienvenidos a Mexico

Puerto Chiapas

We decided not to do any touring today and instead stayed onboard our ship, with just a brief walk along the pier area to give us a chance to catch up on our blog and email.  There is very little to see in this most southerly of Mexican ports and a day on deck looks very good to us.

Note:  We passed a long line of people relaxing in deck chairs on the Promenade Deck yesterday.  Not one was texting or using an e-reader. Let’s hear it for print.

We took a dip in the ship’s aft pool, went to lunch at the Lido and then went ashore to post the messages you are now reading.

Tonight is our first formal night and we are looking forward to playing dress-up.

Puerto Quetzal Gorgeous Guatemala

Donna check out gorgeous Guatamelan goods.

Volcano of Fire looms over Antigua

Tuesday, April 23^rd

^{Puerto Quetzal}

Gorgeous Guatemala

Since this was our first time in Guatemala, we decided to take a group tour away from the port and see the city of Antigua de Guatemala. We had a nice breakfast and then boarded a small tour bus for a day of touring to this mountain city. We were looking forward to some cooler weather and a chance to see this town. We were happy for the temperatures in the 70’s after the sticky 90 degree temperature and the humidity of the last 5 days at the coast. We were pleasantly surprised by the beauty and size of Antigua as we had not expected such a lovely large town. We now understand why this place was chosen as a UNESCO World Heritage sight. We have been to a number of places with this designation throughout the world and have never been disappointed and Antigua was no exception.

We were lucky to have been assigned an excellent tour guide for this day excursion. Our guide, Nury, is an archeologist and local who has been a tour guide for 25 years so she was able to share an enormous amount of information during the 5 hour trip.

Once we arrived in the town our elevation was over 5000 feet and very comfortable for wandering throughout. We first went to the jade museum and again met the American expert on jade. Mary Lou recognized us and welcomed us to her museum and jade factory and showed us around. Then we had an hour or so to wander through the central plaza and market area of this lovely town. We bought some of the items that Guatemala is so famous for, hand woven textiles and mountain coffee beans. We even bought some hand painted necklaces from one of the Mayan women selling them in the plaza.

On  the trip back to the ship, Nury continued her talk about the culture of the Mayan people and told us that 65% of the native people in the country are Mayan and that they are from 21 different groups, each with their own culture and language. Very few have intermarried but she said that her family had done so, therefore she is a mestizo. She also explained that there are over 300 volcanoes in the country. She said that 37 of these are cones and 4 are active with the last eruption very recently in October 2012. They are also plagued by constant earthquakes due to their location on two fault lines. She pointed out some of the buildings and churches that have been destroyed and are currently being rebuilt in Antigua. That restoration is slow due to cost. It was a wonderful educational tour.

We had a chance to Skype home and catch up on our email at a dockside internet café.  Yes, we can live a day or two without going online!

We missed lunch due to our tour so we opted for an earlier dinner and enjoyed the company at our table. They were French Canadians from Quebec City and were bilingual. We were happy to find that they could speak English well as we can’t speak French. With the majority of the guests on this ship from Canada we have met many of our northern neighbors and feel right at home again since our CA. winter home friends are mostly from Canada.

Enjoying Antigua's central plaza

The show was excellent. The entertainer played a variety of instruments, some real and some homemade. They included the banjo, guitar, bagpipes and the ever popular turkey baster! He presented a musical comedy act which was quite entertaining. After the show, we went dancing and then off to bed. Tomorrow is the first of many stops in Mexico.

A Day in Nicaragua

Pedicabs are popular in this Nicaraguan town.

Donna and John relax in hot Corinto

Monday, April 22, 2013 

A Day in Nicaragua

Corinto

We awoke shortly before 6:00 when room service brought coffee to our stateroom.  We went up on deck to experience what we could see would be another hot, humid, tropical day, as is to be expected at the beginning of the rainy season.  After a light breakfast at the Lido, we attended a presentation by another speaker on board, an archaeologist residing in Guatemala, who is a world-renowned expert on jade, Mary Lou. Her level of expertise was truly astounding.

Dressing as lightly as possible, we disembarked to the portside town of Corinto, Nicaragua.  This port gets very few cruise ships in each year, so really is not fully set up tourism.  This made our visit much more authentic than the tourist traps full of diamond merchants and other chain operations that you find so often in cruise ports.  The area is apparently not wealthy, in any sense of the word. The most common form of public transportation is bicycle-driven pedal-carts.

After buying a few, inexpensive, souvenirs and slaking our thirsts with some beverages, we returned to the ship in time for lunch. We were able to practice our Spanish a bit more as well as obtain a few local coins, the cordoba, for our collection.

We were assigned open seating at dinner so we have been able to sit with different guests. We are also able to go to dinner at our choice of times so that is so much nicer than assigned seating that we usually are given as guest lecturers.

After dinner, we went to the show and then off to bed for a good night’s sleep ready for tomorrow in Guatemala. Buenos noches.

Tuesday, April 23^rd

^{Puerto Quetzal}

Pacific Ocean, west of Costa Rica

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Pacific Ocean, west of Costa Rica

We are now under way, heading to Nicaragua.

Our day started with a lazy morning at our hotel/condo in Jaco, Costa Rica.  After a bit of packing, we had our usual breakfast of tropical fruits, coffee and toast and then took a dip in the pool.  We had the entire pool to ourselves, since the surfers were challenging the ocean waves. We enjoyed swim thoroughly.

We checked out of the hotel, applying our leftover colones to our hotel bill and grabbed our taxi to head to the port of Caldera, located about an hour north of Jaco.  We enjoyed seeing much of the area in the daylight that we had passed after dark on the way in, especially the river filled with 16 ft long crocodiles (swimming not recommended).

We had no trouble boarding our ship, since we were one of the half-dozen staff members new to Statendam at this location.  We were last on this ship 15 years ago, before starting our careers as cruise-ship lecturers and, after a lunch in the Lido, we enjoyed re-discovering the ship. 

Statendam is a relatively small ship, by today’s standards, with fewer than 1300 passengers.  We appreciated how Holland-America has worked to preserve the traditions of their 140 year-old line.  Unlike many of the new mega-ships, HAL does not find in necessary to have every square foot of the deck, a revenue-producing area.

After meeting with the ships Event Manager, Linda, we retired to our room to unpack.  Following a spectacular tropical thunder and lighting show, featuring simultaneous booms and flashes, the ship pulled out of its dock at the industrial port of Caldera. We headed northwest to Nicaragua.

Following a fine dinner in the Rotterdam restaurant, we enjoyed the entertainment provided by the ship’s singers and dancers at the 10:00 show. We were amused by the fact that we were younger that most of the audience at the program. 

We turned in shortly after 11:00 after a busy day.  Donna reported the following morning that she did not remember her head hitting the pillow.

Gliding through the Rain Forest

iguana a.k.a. "tree chicken

Donna relaxes outside our condo.

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Day two in Costa Rica

Today we were able to relax in the morning as our tour van was not scheduled to pick us up until almost 11:00 am. We had another continental breakfast which we enjoyed very much. The fresh tropical fruit plate was excellent. Along with a slice of toast and coffee, we were ready to explore.

While waiting for our tour, we walked around the grounds of this lovely hotel as we had not had a chance to do so as of yet. We also walked on the beach and watched the surfers riding the big waves in front of our hotel.

Today Kari had scheduled us to visit the Rain Forest and it was very lush and lovely. The van trip was short and we arrived at the park where we were met by a park guide named Ronald. Not the typical Spanish name! We were the only two on this tour with the guide so it was very personal. First we boarded the aerial tram which travels over the top of the Rain Forest. Ronald explained about all of the plants and the few animals that we saw in the trees as we rose about the forest at the top of the mountain. It was interesting to learn about the foliage but we didn’t see many animals from the tram.

After the tram ride of about 45 minutes, Ronald took us on a walk through the grounds for about an hour. He took us to the serpentarium which had many varieties of snakes, all alive and all in glass cages thank goodness. At each stop, he explained which were venomous and which were not and told us about their native Costa Rican habitat. He also shared more information on the plant life as we wandered through the area. This was very educational for us.

We left the park and asked the van driver if he could drop us off in the town of Joca instead of our hotel. He did not speak English but we asked him in Spanish and were glad that he understood where we wanted to go. We walked around the town and found it to be no different than any other tacky, surfer, tourist town. Nothing changes in these beach towns regardless of the country we are in.

After lunch at a bar, we decided to walk back to our hotel. We checked our hiking GPS that we always take with us when we are traveling; and realized that the walk back was only about 1 ½ miles so that would be easy. We had been told that the best way to get around the area was via the beach as the highway is very busy with no walking area on the shoulder.

Just as we began our town and beach walk, the daily thunder storm began. There was lots of thunder and lightning again over the surrounding mountains but only a light rain this time, unlike yesterday’s downpour. We decided that it wouldn’t hurt to walk in the rain so we did that and enjoyed the beach in the rain.

We got back and showered and washed our wet and sticky, sandy clothes as there was a washer and dryer in our condo. It will be nice to start the cruise tomorrow with all clean clothes. We had purchased a bread at the local panaderia which we had as our our dinner in the condo. We had to smile as this was what we call a 'french bread' but in this bakery shop they listed it as 'American bread'.

Later the skies cleared and as the sun was setting, we heard the beautiful sounds of guitar music coming from the beach. We wandered down to enjoy the source of these melodic sounds coming from a wedding being held on our hotel beach. We watched the ceremony for about one hour and it reminded us of two beach weddings that are so close to our hearts. One was our daughter Kari and son-in-law Jim’s on the beach in Mexico and the other was our niece Catherine and her partner Sarah’s wedding on Cape Cod.

Lovely memories to end another lovely day together. Another day of Pura Vida in the paradise of Costa Rica.

enjoying the view from the tram

Day 2 Pura Vida in Costa Rica

Friday, April 19, 2013

We were both so tired last night after all of the travels and late arrival here in Costa Rica that we don’t remember our heads hitting our pillows. We had to wake up very early this morning, after such a long day yesterday, as our tour bus driver was picking us up at 6:50 am. We would have liked to sleep a little later but were eager to go on this tour that Kari, our travel agent daughter, had scheduled for us. We were going to the Manuel Antonio National Park.

The hotel restaurant did not open until 7am but they were nice enough to prepare a nice box with toast and fresh tropical fruit that we ate on the tour bus on our way to the national park. We enjoyed it very much.

The ride to the park took over an hour with stops to pick up some other tourists at other hotels. We toured with a nice group of young people, all in their 20-30’s so we were the oldsters in the group and were happy to be able to keep up on the 2 ½ hour nature walk. We had one young couple from Mexico, one from Chile, a young Danish girl and a young pharmacist who just started his first job in south Texas.

We had a very knowledgeable park guide and he was able to spot all of the animals in the talk trees of this tropical park. After spotting each, he gave us information on what we were seeing. He had a high power telescope on a tripod and he focused on each animal and gave each of us the opportunity to view. He pointed out both kinds of iguanas, two-toed and three-toed sloths, other reptiles, birds and insects and he knew all of the bird calls. The birds answered his calls throughout our tour.

At the end of the park tour, we were given time to enjoy some beach time and John and I walked the beach in the waves and then continued for another few hours to the local town. Along the way we were excited to see many coati mundi stealing things from beach-goers towels. They are considered the thieves of the beach and look very much like raccoons.  We also saw many white face monkeys right next to the trail as they jumped from tree to tree and ran by our feel.   

Donna made an interesting observation on our hike through the park.  One group we passed had, as members a family with a girl about 14 years of age.  She wore on her face that typically bored expression that many teens develop.  She kept looking at her empty hand, as if searching for the text message that would not appear on her absent smart phone...

We did a little shopping in town for some bottled water and drinks and then met up with the rest of the tour group for a lunch at a restaurant near the beach. It was a nice local dish called cosado. It is the traditional plate lunch including fresh fish, rice, black beans, plantain and vegetables. Very tasty!

We rode the tour van back in a huge thunderstorm and were happy that it waited until be got on board. The day was hot and sticky so we weren’t surprised to see the storm but it was nice to have this after our 6 hours of hiking and walking.

We went out for a snack at the hotel outdoor restaurant as we weren’t very hungry. I had a small bowl of sopa mariscos (soup with fresh fish) and John had quesadillas camarones  (shrimp). These two appetizers hit the spot.

Our first day in Costa Rica was muy bien and we look forward to another full day of tours tomorrow.

Day One, Palm Springs to Costa Rica adventure

Thursday, April 18

Hi, ho, hi ho, it’s in the air we go.

We have been looking forward to this day for quite a long time.  This would be our first day for airline travel.  Not wanting to sleep in, we set our alarm clocks for 4:30 a.m.  John beat the alarm by one minute and was already making the coffee by the time Donna got up. 

Our good friend, Wally arrived promptly at 5:30 to transport us to nearby Palm Springs Airport.  The airport, known as PSP, is a small, but efficient, facility without long lines or crowded waiting areas.  The first leg of our trip was a one hour hop to Phoenix, where we would make our connection to San Jose, Costa Rica after a three hour layover.

We seldom fly US Air.  Know we know why.  While they don’t advertise as a “no frills” line, that is what they deliver.  The 5 ½ hour Costa Rica leg offered no entertainment of any kind, including music. Three free cold drinks were offered and an optional, but rather bland, lunch was offered at unrealistically high prices.  US Air also had no pillows or blankets

The highlight of the flight was the sunset as we finished the last half of our leg in to San Jose.  The clouds pile up around in a variety of hues and formations.  I have never witnessed such a sunset, looking down across the starboard wing.

Checking through customs was a breeze and we were soon met by our driver for the 1 ½ hour drive to our hotel in the coastal town of Jaco.  I’m sure this would have been a beautiful drive through the mountains during the day, but since it was already dark, all we really could see were a stream of headlights as we passed through the rain forest.

Arriving at our hotel, Jaco Club del Mar, at 8:30 we were tired and famished, having not eaten a real meal in over 12 hours.  Fortunately, the restaurant offered some wonderful choices.  John ordered the casado (Thanks, Kari, for the recommendation!) and Donna had the shrimp quesadillas.

We turned in dead tired.  Neither of us remembers our head hitting the pillow.

Hasta maňana

Sunset over Costa Rica from jet

Donna has no problem find a seat at Palm Springs Airport

The Pacific Saga Begins

Why the hell are you flying to Costa Rica?   This is the question that is probably on your mind.  Well, opportunity knocks and we have a chance to work on another cruise.  On Thursday, April 18, we will be flying from our “off season” home in Palm Springs to San Jose, Costa Rica’s capital. 

We have been to the country about five times previously, but since each of these was a port stop, we have not had the opportunity to visit the interior.  Our ship started in Florida and will be transiting the Panama Canal before we board. We will be joining the cruise at its west coast port of Puerto Caldera on April 21.  This will give us three days to do a little exploring in Costa Rica.

We will try to post blog entries as the trip progresses, but connectivity is not always possible. We will also be visiting Nicaragua and Guatemala and a number of stops in Mexico and then in San Diego before we disembark in Vancouver BC.

Please check in with us from time to time as we travel.

Pura Vida,

Desert View

John and Donna