The bus dropped us at the pier jutting out from the peninsula on which Puntarenas was located and where Star Princess was docked. Rather than immediately join the queue of people waiting to get through security and back into the wonderful air-conditioned interior of our floating home we tolerated a little more of Costa Rica’s heat and humidity in order to take some photos along the pier.

Predictably, I took a few photos from the balcony once we got back to our room too even though they were remarkably similar to ones I’d taken earlier in the day when we’d first arrived in Puntarenas. Looks often pass between me and my wife in situations like this and if you could read minds you’d probably hear:

These photos won’t be exactly the same as earlier. The light will be different. The clouds will have moved. My earlier pictures might have sensor dirt in a vital spot. A whale might leap out of the ocean.

Sure, Jan.

Food And Drink Aboard Star Princess

We’d had one coffee and one beer in Costa Rica in addition to the water we’d brought with us to combat the conditions so we were keen to grab a drink or two once on the ship. We were also keen to freshen up so after showers had been taken and we’d spent five minutes watching bats flying past our balcony we hit a few locations where the staff were graciously willing to take a look at our cruise cards (or just nod and smile in the case of Vines) in exchange for alcohol.

Just before I put up the photos of the evening’s dinner from the main dining room on Star Princess I’m obliged by law to mention yet again that the food served on this cruise was the best we’ve had on any cruise. Princess do well in that respect generally but everything just felt like a step up this time around.

Deck Party

Several hours after leaving the port of Puntarenas and the country of Costa Rica behind we headed up to the top deck. It was another sultry night on the Pacific Ocean and Princess were putting on another deck party. We’ve never been drunk enough to join in yet but they’re quite fun to watch for a while even if some of the orchestrated dancing between the staff and passengers more resembles a zumba workout than what we’d consider fun.

In the next post in this cruise diary travel portfolio we’ll hit another new country for us, Nicaragua.

If you’ve read the previous cruise diary entry in this travel portfolio then you’ll know that we had already boarded the tour bus at the pier at Puntarenas and had a brief stop to feed White-faced Capuchins at the roadside. A fairly lengthy drive from the port city to the nation’s capital then followed with ample information about Costa Rica’s economy, geography, and history supplied by our guide. In the video below (temporarily removed) you can catch part of that drive and some of the landscape compressed into a couple of minutes, and near the start you’ll be able to see some of the wildfires in the hillsides that were a constant sight both going to and coming from San José.

The National Theatre Of Costa Rica

First stop of the day on this excursion was just outside Plaza De La Cultura for a visit to Costa Rica’s National Theatre.

After a little bit of chaos caused by our bus not having enough tickets to get in but the other bus having more tickets than it needed thus requiring us to wait until everyone had arrived so tickets could be allocated properly (which they still weren’t so I was the sole person without a ticket but was waved through anyway) we made our way out of the heat of the day and into the considerably cooler and darker building’s interior. We gathered in the main theatre space while half the excursion passengers headed off to use the toilets (naturally) and this gave me a chance to take some photos, although the low light of this part of the theatre didn’t make this an easy task.

Once everyone was ready we were seated in the front rows of the theatre and were informed about some of its history and features. José Joaquín Rodríguez Zeledón was, in addition to being an almost unbeatable score in Scrabble, the fifteenth president of Costa Rica, holding that position from 1890 to 1894. It wasn’t the most peaceful of presidencies with congress being dissolved at one point and many of his methods of controlling the populace not exactly meeting with their approval. In 1891 he did, however, initiate the building of the National Theatre in San José (partially financed through coffee taxation) although its construction was beset with problems. Zeledón was succeeded by Rafael Yglesias Castro who was so impressed with technological progress happening in Europe during official visits to France and the United Kingdom that he brought in an Italian engineer to address the problems with the theatre’s construction and complete it. This was duly done and in 1897 the National Theatre of Costa Rica was opened, its first production being Faust with Castro in attendance.

Moving on from the history we were given some explanations of the design of the theatre which borrowed a lot of influences inside and out from Europe, the cultural home of theatre at the time, including large amounts of Italian marble. The National Theatre was also one of the first buildings in Central America to have electric lighting. The thing we most liked was that the floor could be raised mechanically so that it was level with the stage, giving the theatre the ability to host a larger area for non-theatrical events too.

We headed upstairs next, amassing on the stairs in order to be shown some of the architectural styles and artworks on show there. Of particular significance was the 1897 mural Allegory Of Coffee And Bananas by the Italian artist Aleardo Villa. Villa never visited Costa Rica and so there are a couple of issues with it, namely that coffee grows in the mountains, not by the sea, and the bananas are being held upside down. Nevertheless, the mural is well-loved by the Costa Rican people.

Upstairs was the foyer, a large, open, light, impressive room with plenty of features to look at and admire. It was possible to walk around the outside of the room but not cross the centre which was a shame as the most interesting feature of the room for us was the painting on the ceiling. The photos can’t do it justice because the angles are impossible to correct for but in the paintings there are cherubs and angels who appear to be looking one way when viewed from one side of the room and another way when viewed from the other side; eyes that don’t follow you around the room.

We finished our visit to Costa Rica’s National Theatre with a quick look from the balcony seats before we headed back out into the sunshine.

Outside the theatre we bought some souvenir currency. The five colón note was no longer in circulation but its design was a famous one in the country and related to our visit. The face of the note contained the portrait of Rafael Yglesias Castro while the reverse was a copy of Allegory Of Coffee And Bananas.

Pre-Columbian Gold Museum

A very short walk from the theatre was the Pre-Columbian Gold Museum. The entrance to this was behind and below the theatre with the bulk of the building continuing further beneath the ground. As befits a museum housing a lot of gold there was a fair amount of security to get through with bags scanned and checked through and metal detectors passed through too. And, of course, the museum structure, being subterranean and constructed from concrete, was further security in and of itself. As a fan of brutalist architecture the design of the museum was fabulous to my eyes (and caused a security guard to give me a quizzical look as I took a photo of the ceiling concrete) and its raw, spartan construction contrasted wonderfully with the intricate items housed in the building.

The first floor down contained the National Coin Museum. I can’t confess to being wowed by coins in general unless they’re significantly different in some way although we do collect what we can when we travel as mementoes. For a numismatist, though, there was plenty to look at and lots of information at hand. Probably of most interest to me were the coffee plantation tokens. During the explosion in coffee production in Costa Rica so much land was given over to growing coffee that more trade had to take place to provide people with what they needed. This trade exceeded the capacity of the country’s mint to provide so the government permitted foreign currency to be used and, on the plantations, private currency in the form of tokens came into being. These were constructed of various materials, marked for the plantation, and could be used in stores owned by the plantation owners as well as elsewhere if the plantation owners were trusted by the storekeepers. The idea was that labourers could be paid in tokens until such time as real currency became available when they would be able to exchange it but it did lock the workers into spending a proportion of their earnings with the owners when currency was scarce. Nice for the owners. Token usage was phased out in the 1970s.

The lowest level contained the gold museum. The museum doesn’t just house gold items, with numerous artifacts from the same range of history of Costa Rica on display alongside some modern pieces of art, some of it abstract, that really appeals to me. One of the older sculptures looked remarkably like Ludo from the film Labyrinth.

But it was the gold that was the main draw for this visit to the museum, especially for a certain someone’s wife. Pre-Columbian refers to the time before European influences swept into the countries of the Americas. The museum houses over 1600 gold artifacts from about 500 C.E. onwards in that period and showcases the artistry and skill of the gold workers with items such as necklaces, hair barrettes, coins, and figurines. Animals feature prominently amongst the gold figures although in some cases you have to try to decide whether the artist had ever seen one before or if evolution selected that particular species for a quick eradication in the wake of its memorialisation in gold.

The Pre-Columbian Gold Museum had a very small gift shop but nothing interesting or affordable for our tastes so while we waited for others to complete their tour or visit the gift shop or use the toilets we headed back outside and into the main square above the museum in order to take some photos before getting back on the bus.

Plaza De La Cultura

The Plaza de La Cultura is the public square directly overhead the Gold Museum and lies adjacent to and north of the National Theatre. This was a popular place for locals as it was around lunchtime at this point. Shops surrounded the square on three sides but it was the art sculptures in the square that I was most interested in. I always like to see art on public display and as I’ve mentioned before I’m a fan of some of the more abstract pieces, and especially those where it comes to sculptures of human figures. The pieces by the Costa Rican sculptor Jiménez Deredia stood out in the plaza (the influences from pre-Columbian cultures is evident) although I liked all the artwork that we saw there.

We ended up spending longer in the Plaza de La Cultura than we’d hoped as there were several missing people by the time our guide arrived and counted us all up. Twice he went back to the museum to check for them and twice we suggested that perhaps they’d headed off to the bus instead. Eventually, he came to the same conclusion and we all headed back to the comfort of an air-conditioned vehicle and out of the searing sunshine. Our fellow excursion passengers were there which we were glad about as it meant we could head off to lunch but it would have been nice if they’d let someone know they weren’t going to meet where everyone else was.

The last part of San José that we passed on foot as we came to our bus was a statue erected opposite the entrance to the National Theatre, dedicated to Juan Mora Fernández, Costa Rica’s first elected head of state.

Swiss Travel Lunch

After a drive through parts of San José to point out landmarks such as the national football stadium, embassies, and even the schools that our guide attended we headed to Swiss Travel’s own restaurant and events venue off Radial Colón to the west of San José. There was no escaping the fact that it was a lovely-looking place. Local handicrafts were being sold as we came in and we made sure to spend some of our Costa Rican money there on the way out as we were in need of souvenirs for family back home and we always try to find things that aren’t too mass-produced if we can.

The important thing was getting some local food and drink in us, though. We had Costa Rican coffee in Costa Rica, of course, and that was included in the excursion but we also found out we could buy local beer too and with us suffering a little from the Central American heat and humidity – not to mention being lushes – we had to get some. The really interesting part of the buffet meal came afterwards when dessert was served. This turned out to be an intensely-flavoured, ridulously sweet, thick, creamy, passionfruit whip in a rippled, hard wafer. It was gorgeous.

El Jardin Souvenir Shop

The final stop before getting back to Puntarenas was at El Jardin Souvenir Shop which was surprisingly large and surprisingly well-stocked with many things of interest. This was a great place to purchase some coffee beans to take home so we did, choosing some Dota Tarrazú beans from Café Leo Seguetto on the recommendation of our guide. The Tarrazú region is highly regarded for its slow-maturing beans on account of the volcanic soil and altitude; the Dota Estate takes advantage of the micro-climate and produces exclusive blends of red and yellow Arabica beans. You want to know how they smell? Fabulous! You want to know what the coffee is like? More fabulous!

A Canadian in our tour group was next to me as I picked out the coffee to buy. “I can get that cheaper back home,” he said, then wandered across to look at something else. I’m sure he could, but that’s not the point of being a responsible tourist visiting other countries.

With coffee and some other souvenirs purchased, our day’s cruise excursion in Costa Rica and San José in particular came to and end. In the next cruise diary post I’ll cover returning to Star Princess at Puntarenas and our departure from Costa Rica ahead of the next stop in Nicaragua.

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.