Costa Rica – “Jungle River Cruise”

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Here’s a little TBT post for this chilly day.  I’m sitting bundled up, and daydreaming of warm weather (you know, the usual for me in the winter…).

In 2010, my husband and I went on a trip to Costa Rica.  He planned the trip, and thought we’d be spending all our time on the beach or by the pool at our all-inclusive resort.  Well, it turned out that the weather was overcast and breezy so neither of those things happened very much.  We only made it down to the beach once or twice to walk around, and at the time it smelled a little fishy.  There was a cute gift store near the beach which of course I enjoyed.  We also tried signing up for a kayak trip through the hotel but it was canceled both times we hoped to go.

I felt a little bummed that my husbands dream for this vacation was a little crushed by the weather, but I have to say, the trip for me turned out better than I could have hoped for!  We stayed at Vilas Sol in Guanacaste.  The hotel was nice, we had a beautiful view of the trees (and woke up hearing the monkeys most days!).  The food was awesome.  They had different theme nights, and the waiters were so friendly.

One of our first days at the hotel, we saw that they had information for CATours, which was a tour company you could book excursions through and they would pick you up at the hotel.  We ended up going on THREE of those trips, and they were so much fun!  I’m not sure if they offer the exact tours we did or not, but we went on a full day trip to Nicaragua and went to a market, then a zip -lining/horseback riding/spa combo day, and finally the jungle river cruise.

Here are a few pictures from the Jungle River Cruise!

The featured image on this post is similar to the boat we took on the river.  The guide was so nice and very knowledgeable.  We were the first boat to head down the river that morning, and I have to say, I think we ended up seeing more than the group behind us since some of the animals would head deeper into the jungle or back into the water once they heard the boat coming.  We all saw a lot of animals though.

This guy was neat to see, and really shook that tree branch!  We saw him early on in the trip, so our hopes were high.

The guide showed us this really cool flower.  If I recall correctly it started out in kind of a long tube/pod and then when that was pulled off, this flower popped out.

We saw so many birds, and monkeys, and even an alligator.  Pretty awesome, but my trip was absolutely MADE when we pulled up to a shoreline where the guide had spotted a white-headed capuchin.  I was SO EXCITED, this has been one of my favorite animals ever since I was little so it was awesome to see them out in the wild.  Well, it got even crazier when more monkeys started to appear!  And then…. they boarded our boat!  Wasn’t expecting that hah.

This monkey really loved looking at his reflection in the mirror :)

The Jungle River Cruise turned out to be one of our favorite parts of our trip to Costa Rica.  Obviously there is no way of knowing what you’re going to see on an excursion like this, but we were very happy!