Category: Travel

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Dolphins & A Whale

Today I took the “Whale-watching Tour,” 4 hours on a boat in the Pacific Ocean with 4 other tourists, all from Germany, and we saw much more than a whale which we only saw during our last hour. Later I will post about the natural arches, birds on Whale Rock Island, snorkeling, and other things we did or saw – just the dolphins and the whale today with 3 photos of each. Note that whales come up for air only every 10 to 15 minutes and stay up for only 3 or 4 seconds and one doesn’t know where they will come up! 🙂 Almost impossible to photograph! 🙂 Below whale shots are me barely catching the tail as it goes back under water – same whale, 3 different times. Fortunately, Dolphins stay on the surface longer! 🙂

Tropical or Spotted Dolphin, Uvita, Costa Rica.
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Tonight’s Sunset

Well – it seemed spectacular when watching but I was not able to catch that in the camera! Nine shots will give an idea of what it was like but all light cannot be captured in the camera. The wide ones were shot on my cellphone and the others on my Canon SLR. After two nights of rain during sunset, it was nice to have a little bit of a light show! 🙂 I’ll show one image here for the emailed blog version, then online a gallery of all nine.

Sunset 23 Dec 2021, Uvita, CR
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A Bird, A Bug & A Bouquet

Well, we had a real sunset tonight, so that will be a separate post a little later. Here’s the representatives of daytime today . . .

Yellow-throated Toucan eating breakfast one morning.
Butterfly on a “Hot Lips” Flower
One of my many “favorite” Costa Rica flowers.

Later tonight I will have some sunset photos to share.

¡Pura Vida!

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Second Day Report

I woke up to rain this morning which continued until after breakfast when it cleared off and was mostly a hot, sunny day as you can expect some of the time on the coast. 🙂 The below photo is what the ocean view looked like just AFTER breakfast. All afternoon I hoped for a clear skies sunset but around 4pm the clouds and rain starting moving in. Below this ocean image is a gallery with a couple of birds (12 species today!), one butterfly and one tree from a wonderful walk in the rainforest this morning plus my effort at a sunset photo again this evening in the rain. 🙂

After breakfast, around 8 am, clear skies that continued until about 4 pm.
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A Cloudy-Rainy Start

When I got here about 11 this morning it was cloudy and lightly raining and it stayed that way all day as you can see in the photos below, but at sunset I managed to capture a little bit of light through the clouds and by saturating the color in the photo it almost looks like a sunset! 🙂

Top End Room Mine above the “Pura Vida” Hedge with ocean view.
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Flight Photos

One of the fun things about some of my trips is getting to fly in a small plane. Though I almost had to hire a taxi to drive down today because yesterday I got an email from Sansa Airlines telling me my flight to Palmar Sur was canceled. But fortunately when I called Sansa they had one seat left on the 9 am to Quepos which is a little bit further from Uvita, but okay – an hour taxi drive which is better than 4 hours drive from Atenas. 🙂

I always keep my cellphone camera busy on these little short 30 minute flights. Here’s 5 of the many shots I made:

Over the mountains & valleys!
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Why I’m Traveling with Covid Up?

The eye patch is not required here! 🙂 It covers my non-blinking eye for comfort.

With the huge increase of Covid Omicron engulfing the U.S. and other parts of the world, you may wonder why I risk traveling here in Costa Rica? At least 7 reasons:

  1. Covid is not increasing here but down to near nothing.
  2. We have a VACCINATION MANDATE for all of Costa Rica (Biden tried, Republicans said no). I have a cool code on my phone showing proof of vaccination + a printed version & my vaccination card.
  3. All our adults and teens are vaccinated now and the children in process and adults are in process for their 3rd or booster shot, with no one allowed in the country without proof of vaccination (2 shots minimum) or into some business here and in all after Jan. 8.
  4. MASK MANDATE is still in effect for anywhere outside your home!
  5. HAND WASHING is required to enter any business anywhere in Costa Rica.
  6. 1.8 METER DISTANCING (6 feet) is required anywhere outside your home!
  7. Costa Ricans listen to science and do what our Health Ministry says to do with no stupid American Republican Party fighting it. What a great place to live! 🙂
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My Christmas Treat

Tomorrow morning early I fly Sansa south to the Palmar Sur Airport south of Uvita and then back north by car to Uvita where I’m doing a repeat visit to the Hotel Cristal Ballena (Hotel site link) on a hill overlooking Uvita’s Whale-watching bay on the Pacific Coast (feature photo & one below). I will not be quite as active as I was on my last trip there: 2019-September 13-21–Cristal Ballena, Uvita (link to my trip gallery). The photos from then will show you what a wonderful place it is to just hang out at the hotel and hike in their private rainforest not to mention all the nearby sights! December-February is the time for Humpback Whales from South America to be there, so I might get to see & photo one! 🙂

I have an Ocean View Room!

And here’s just two of the wildlife I photographed from my room terrace last time . . .

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Man-made Bird?

On my walk up the hill the other morning a couple of little planes flew over and I decided to “capture” the second one in a photo! It is not one of our commercial passenger planes, Sansa Airlines, but some older private plane doing who knows what? 🙂

Plane flying over Atenas.

¡Pura Vida!

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Cloud Cuckoo Land a Must-read for . . .

. . . lovers of stories, books and libraries – the 3 main characters in this multi-layered story of totally different people from the 1450’s all the way through 2020 and to the future in 2164, all impacted by this fictitious lost and found story by a very early Greek writer who called his story “Cloud Cuckoo Land” (in Classical Greek of course!). It touches on so many life issues and about our own future on earth that I won’t try to list them all. You move between the stories of totally different people (ages 12 to 86) affected by Cloud Cuckoo Land (the Greek novel) in Constantinople (1450’s), Bulgaria (1450’s), Idaho (1940’s to 2020), Korea (1950’s), and outer space (2164) so that like his “All the Light” book (just 2 overlapping stories) you can get confused at first (if not more so). Eventually the many complicated pieces of the puzzle start coming together and you too begin to get what all these others are getting from Cloud Cuckoo Land. It is more multi-layered than Anthony Doerr’s previous classic All the Light We Cannot See (Goodreads Reviews), but just as impactful (if not more so) and will certainly become another classic! I highly recommend both books! 🙂

Read some other Goodreads Reviews of this NY Times best seller, Cloud Cuckoo Land. Now I will simplify my reading escapes with another Agatha Christie mystery! 🙂 Rest my simple mind which is still spinning from this read. 🙂

¡Pura Vida!