We went on a Panama Canal cruise!!!!!!!!! It was 2 weeks of fantastic. This was our second cruise. The first cruise we went on was to Alaska and we went on Holland America. We LOVED it! But we decided to try a different cruise line, so this time we went with Norwegian Cruise Line. We picked them for 2 reasons: 1) With a 2 week cruise we were going to have A LOT of time on the boat, so we wanted one with a lot of activities and entertainment, and we were not disappointed. 2) They were the cheapest. For 2 weeks we paid about $1000 per person (including our taxes and fees), which is not bad!
Our cruise went from Sunday to Sunday, leaving out of Miami and ending in LA. Since it is a really bad thing if you miss your boat, and since I haven't really experienced Florida (I spent the night in the Miami airport and another night in the Tampa airport - I didn't feel like I had really experience Florida then) we decided to spend a day there before we disembarked. We flew into Miami on Saturday. We love national parks but didn't have sufficient time for Everglades, so we went to Biscayne, it was closer and a bit smaller (kind of). Even though I didn't get as much time there as I would like, and if I have the chance again there is a lot more I would like to do, I do feel like we got a good taste of it.
Biscayne is a unique national park because it is almost entirely water. It's a marine preserve really. We had wanted to go on one of their glass-bottom boat tours but didn't arrive in time to make it. So we rented a kayak - which was FANTASTIC! We especially loved kayaking in the lagoons. The time flew by! After kayaking we got to ride along on a boat headed to pick up a group of canoeing out at one of the islands,s o it was fun to get to see some more of the park. If we were to go back to Biscayne and had more time I would like to go snorkeling/diving as well as on a guided kayak trip. They are considering doing a combo kayak/snorkel trip, which I think would be fantastic!
You can't tell from these pictures how incredibly beautiful the lagoons in particular and the whole park in general were, so you will just have to take my word for it :) (unless you decided to go there to experience it for yourself which I think is a very good idea!)
We saw several animals on our adventures, but mostly crabs and birds. In the lagoons when you look on the land it looks like thousands of bugs all over, but when you look a little longer you realize they aren't bugs, they're crabs! Unfortunately I wasn't able to get any good pictures of them.
After we left Biscayne we were quite hungry. We wanted to try some Cuban food. It took us a while to find the right restaurant, but we did. Yum! I loved all our food, but I was sold when they brought us a bowl of popcorn with incredible seasoning on it for an appetizer. Are you kidding me, it was amazing. We then tried to experience Miami Beach but after waiting in traffic for about an hour and not finding parking we turned around to check into our hotel.
Sunday morning we got ready, checked out, and headed back to Miami Beach. Although it was quite pretty and we enjoyed our walk along the shore be warned - Miami Beach seems to be largely populated by tourists, mostly from Europe, who don't seem to realize that toplessness and nudity aren't normal or okay in America. We saw a lot of boobies - we practiced averting out eyes.
We then headed to church. After a great deal of effort and lots of miles we came to the conclusion that the address from lds.org was just wrong. The address didn't exist and there was no church building in that area, so we were pretty disappointed. We returned our rental car and got on our boat.
So, I could give you a day by day play of what we did on our boat, but since it was two weeks tat would be really long and would probably get fairly boring for you so I will just sum it up while highlighting our shore stops and trip through the canal.
We were busy all day every day, there was so much to do. Our boat had a sports court, climbing wall, shuffle board, life-size chess board, bowling alley, swimming pools with a water slide, a movie theater-sized screen to play Wii, golf cages, and a gym. We never actually played chess since I don't know how, and we didn't go bowling because we were too cheap to pay the extra fees, but we made good use of everything else. We also attended performance, game shows, and other activities. We never had time to get bored.
Monday, our first full day on the boat was my 32nd birthday - what a way to celebrate! As if being on the cruise wasn't enough, Ryan gave me an 8 GB memory card. Now this may not sound like a big deal. But our other memory card holds 500 pictures, which is a lot of pictures, but it has happened more than once that i have filled it up on trips. It is not Ryan's favorite thing that I take so many pictures, it slows down our hikes and takes a lot of computer space. So to give me a card that will hold 2000 pictures was very selfless of him. Not only that, he somehow was able to do it so that I had no idea, and considering I do ALL the packing because I'm really good at it (not trying to brag here, just being honest) I don't think it was easy for him to keep it hidden from me. And he won't tell me how he did it.
NCL is known for "Free Style Cruising" - so there goal is to help you relax and have fun. They have crazy chairs and beds all over the place, should you feel the need to just lounge. Our room was tiny, you couldn't even walk around the bed on one side because a table got in the way, but that was okay because we didn't spend a whole lot of time in our room. Most of our cruise we were very lucky with very little poor weather or rocking of the boat. But our final day that changed. We got rain, but not only that, the boat was super rocky. The upper left picture shows water splashing out of one of the pools, it was crazy. Luckily neither of us got sick, others on the boat were not so fortunate :(.
We both improved a lot at climbing during our two weeks. I'm not saying I'm ready to go pro, but I could see it in my future. We also celebrated Easter (and Passover - we even attended a Sedar, which was awesome) while on the boat. Egg painting was one of the activities. They had lots of activities and contests we participated in. We did not win at ping pong, but we did win shuffle board, soccer, volley ball, and synchronized swimming (we had a former junior Olympics synchronized swimmer on our team, which may have helped).
There were three main stair cases on the boat. At the mid-floor landing of each one were wall-sized pictures. On the stair case closest to our room (so the one we took the most) there were these wildlife photographs - we loved them. Our favorite is the one of the lions staring at the elephant while drinking water. They are by a guy named Steve Bloom if you want to check him out.
We got to see a lot of sunsets and sunrises while on the boat - pretty. We also saw Cuba, for an entire day. I guess I can't say that I have been to Cuba, but I kind of feel like I have.
The food on NCL wasn't as good or as pretty as on Holland America, but that didn't stop us from eating A LOT of it.
Our first port-of-call was Cartagena, Columbia. I grew up watching Romancing the Stone, and so have always kind of wanted to go to Cartagena, and now I have. In reading about Cartegena before we left we learned the most popular thing to do there was to walk around the "Walled City", which is the old Cartagena, so that is what we did. We walked about 1.5 to 2 miles from our boat to get there, which I enjoyed because it gave us a chance to see how the locals really lived. We spent several hours walking along the wall and through the city, then walked back to the boat.
I believe the wall used to really be a fortress, there are canons all around it and little outlook tower things.
Within the city there were a lot of pretty buildings. There were also a ton of statues. This on that I am with is said to provide good luck if you touch their hands - at least I think that is true. There are also other forts in Cartegena, one that can be seen from the Walled City.
Even the residential streets in the walled city were pretty.
I found the locals to be amusing, humble, and very resourceful.
We stopped in one of the city parks to have lunch. At first I though I saw a bunch of squirrels in one of the trees, but quickly realized they weren't squirrels, they were monkeys! If you know me well you know monkeys are one of my two favorite animals (the other is dolphins) so seeing them totally made my day! I have no idea what kind of monkeys they are, but I am guessing they are part of the Cebidae Family.
We did actually end up seeing some squirrels. We have taken pictures of squirrels on most of our trips. It is interesting to me how different they look in different places. I had never seen these red squirrels before, and although these particular ones look like they may have rabies, I still thought they were cute.
There were also iguanas all over. Most of them were these big brown ones, but if you can see the one in the tree it was green, and smaller.
There were people selling stuff all over in Cartegena, but these are the things I saw being sold most frequently.
Cartegena has become a very modern city. Here you see their downtown skyline. From what we experienced I really liked Columbia and South America. I would be happy to return.
We went through the Panama Canal a couple days later. The history of the building of the Panama Canal is quite fascinating, and I am not even a big history person. But if you are a history person I recommend reading about it.
Here we are arriving at the first set of locks.
There are 3 sets of locks. The first one (if you are going from the Atlantic to Pacific, obviously if you were going in the other direction then everything would be in reverse order) is the Gatun Locks. The purpose of the locks is to either increase or decrease your elevation, they are kind of like an elevator for a boat. The canal was built above sea level so to pass through it you have to raise up, pass through, and then be lowered down. The Gatun Locks raise you up all three levels so you get to your highest elevation. It takes quite a while to get through them, but it was very interesting.
After passing through the Gatun Locks you spend a while traveling through Gatun Lake, which is super pretty. It is filled with islands. We were told that there was more bio-diverstiy on this one island than in all of Europe! I want to spend some time on that island.
Working in the railroad industry Ryan has a fascination not only with trains, but also with these huge freight ships. He can tell you all about how much they can hold, what kinds of good they ship, etc. Some of these companies ship with BNSF's competition, so you can see Ryan spitting at them :).
The second locks are the Pedro Miguel Locks. You go down one level here. There was a very friendly worker there that not only let us take picutres of him and waved at us, but took pictures of us as well. When a big boat like ours passes through the locks there is only about 2 feet on each side of the boat - fairly stressful for the captain. But it allowed us to reach our and touch it, which was kind of cool. But since it is such a tight squeeze they have to kind of guide you through. These have these cars on a track that they fasten ropes to the boat from to help you through.
The final locks are the Miraflores Locks, which lower you down to levels, back to sea level.
This is a pretty bridge you pass under close to Panama City. I don't remember the name of it, but it was impressive.
It took an entire day to pass through the canal, so we had some time to fit in some activities. We climed, and we also played some golf. We both decided that we play our best gold while in Panama (aka, we hit the target a greater percentage of the time while in Panama than anywhere else).
After passing through the final set of lockes we passed by Panama City. It looks like an interesting place to visit. In this collage you can see a picture of a lot of smaller boats. They are waiting their turn to go through the canal, which happens after dark.
As we were sitting on one of the decks watching the views of Panama City I noticed a really pretty building up on one of the hills. As I looked at it a little longer I realized Moroni was on top - it was a temple. Seeing it was really one of the highlights of the day for me.
Our next stop was Puntarenas, Costa Rica - our favorite stop! We had wanted to go to Manuel Antonio National Park, wehre we could have ziplined, visited beautiful beaches, saw 4 types of monkeys, and hiked through the beautiful national park. But is was quite a ways away, and with it being holy week (the week before Easter) traffic was bad. So here is what we did instead.
After finding the tour company that would be our guides for the day the first thing we did was go to this house where the people provide fruit so tourists can feed monkeys from their hands. The monkeys htat come there are wild monkeys, but they know they are going to get fed so they come in abundance. We were lucky because we were the first car to arrive, so the monkeys were hungry and we had them to ourselves. As I mentioned before, monkeys are my favorite, so I LOVED this! These monkeys are white-headed capuchin, so wish I could have brought one (or 5) back with me!
If we held on to the fruit a little tightly we could actually touch their hands while they tried to get it from us - AWESOME!
We next went ziplining. Ziplining is native to Costa Rica, so of course we had to try it. We decided we are glad we tried it, we really did enjoy it, but don't know if we would do it again, at least we wouldn't in the place we did it. It was pretty, and we expecially liked that we had just our two guides and ourselves in our group. But it cost $50 each and there were only 6 lines, so it was over pretty quick. But it was still fun.
Next our guide took us to a spot where there are often scarlet macaws nesting. Luckily they were there then, so we got to see several.
Then we spent a couple hours hiking through Carara National Park. We would have liked more time but our guide said we couldn't have it, so we were fairly rushed. The time flew by as we were absorbed in the beauty of the place.
Not only was the plant life dense and beautiful, but we saw lots of animals as well. Clockwise form top left: A bird (obviously), I think probably a herring or something; super cool frog; giant tadpoles; butterflies (there were super pretty butterflies all over, but we would see them only one at a time and they woudl never land so that I could get a good picture); leaf-cutter ants; that same herring-like bird plus a crane; a dragon-fly (there were lots of pretty dragon-flies as well); another bird, I think a vulcher, but maybe a hawk; a cute little mammal which I think is a caoti, and an iguana.
Our guide next took us to see some American crocodiles. These things were HUGE, and there were tons of them!
I think these guys were about 20 feet long, if I'm remembering right.
We then headed back to our boat. After checking out the stands along the beach we got some lunch on the boat, then headed to play in the ocean. We tried snorkeling at first, but the visibility was stinky and the current was strong, so we gave up and just spent two hours or so hanging out in the water, which was the perfect temperature!
The beach was super crowded because of holy week and the people there were so funny! We have never been stared at by so many people and so openly. You know how usually if you are staring at someone and they look at you you look away? Not these people. It seemed like every one of them was staring at us and they didn't back down at all if we looked at them. I don't know if they were fascinated because we are white or because of our snorkel gear, but I'm pretty sure I know how animals in zoos feel. It amused me, I think it kind of botehred Ryan.
I'm pretty sure we will have to go back to Costa Rica a time or two. One day was not nearly enough, I'm pretty sure I could spend a year, or my whole life there, and not get bored (although I could do without the sticky wet feeling from the humidity :) ).
Next up was Puerto Quetzal, Guatemala. Our top choice of what to do there was hike the volcano Pacaya. Unfortunately we couldn't find enoough other people on our boat that were interested in doing it, and it would have been too expensive to get guides to take just us. So we ended up doing what almost everyone else does at the port - we took a tour to Antigua (Colonial Antigua as the shore excursion calls it). We still enjoyed that. The drive was beautiful, it is up at a higher elevation so we had a little break from the heat (which was fantastic), and the city itself was interesting and fun to walk around. On the down side, we learned that only Americans are focused on wearing seat belts (we had learned this in Costa Rica actually when I had to ask the driver to find my seat belt). But because their seat belts get used infreequently they are not in great condition. In the car we took the Antigua the seat belt was FILTHY - it stained my shirt and left dark dirt marks on my neck - gross!
The first place they took us after ariving in Antigua was the Jade Factory. I wasn't too thrilled when we pulle dup, but it was actually super interesting. Did you know jade is not only green? It can be white, black, purple, pink - lots of colors. It apparently starts out white but as it gets pushed up to the earth's surface it aquires color. Green is the least expensive jade. Jade is also super hard, nearing the hardness of diamonds. The Mayans loved jade. They thought it had healing powers so they used it medicinally. They also thought if brought good luck so they tried to bury their loved ones surrounded by as much jade as possible. Mayans also used to domesticate jaquars to act as guard dogs. They really liked jaguars and would carve them out of jade often. They also thought it was a good idea to bury people with shells, I can't remember why. Anyway, the jewelry at the jade factory was bit out of our price range, but it was beautiful!
Next we walked around this hotel that was built from old ruins, which was quite cool. There was a museum there you could take a tour of, but we were not interested.
They had beautiful flowers, parrots, and life-sized marionettes doing native tasks all over, which was fun. (Yes, there is a real woman in a picture as well - I did not think she was a marionette - there were no strings attached.)
Our guides next took us to a flee market-type place, which was interesting. Then they took the other couple we were with to a restuarant for lunch. We weren't interested in going out to lunch so we took the time to walk around Antigua, which we really enjoyed.
I really liked seeing the native people!
Some of the things we most frequently saw for sale.
The buildings were just cool, I love how they use more color in other countries.
During holy week they do these mosaic-things on the street with colored sand. We got there the day after easter so there wasn't much of them left, but we saw some remains,a nd they did one in their greeting center for us.
We then went to a coffee plantation. We weren't super interested in the coffee (go figure), but the gorunds were quite pertty and we enjoyed the views.
Then back to the boat. At several of the ports the cities really try to make you feel welcome (and encourage you to spend money) with nice greeting centers. Puerto Quetzals was particularly nice.
Our next (and last) three stops were all in Mexico. First was Huatalco. We had never heard of it but it is a really nice little city. Having never really been to Mexico before our cruise I can't say for sure if this is true, but of the 3 cities we visited it is my experience that the cities are built up only aroudn the ocean. All the cities we went to had mountainous coasts. The cities were packed tightly on the side of the mountains facing the ocean, but didn't extend down the backsides of the mountains at all. Anyway, we had really wanted to go diving in Huatalcoa s we had read really good things abou the diving there, but we only ahd a 4 hour stop there and didn't arive until aroudn noon. Dive boats usually leave pretty early, at least by 9. We were still hopeful, but no luck. There was only one dive company in the area, and the boat was already out for the day. So we decided to go snorkeling instead. We asked at the dive center were the good snorkeling spots would be and found that most people go to the cove just two away from where we were - she said it was about a 15-20 minute walk (no biggie). We went back to the boat to change into walking shoes, drop some stuff of, pick some stuff up. We also picked up a guy on our boat that wanted to try snorkeling, and headed out. After walking for about 30 minutes (and happening upon a military base) we decided to get a taxi to take us the rest of the way. Good decision, we were still several miles away, and it was very hilly, so it would have taken us at least another hour, and with such a short time in the city it is good we didn't waiste it walking in the heat. Even so, I did enjoy the time we had spent walkign throught he residential streets. We were even fortunate enough to spot the Guatemalan (or maybe it was Costa Rica's) national bird, the quetzal - very pretty. We did really enjoy snorkeling. We saw a lot of pretty fish, so giant and super colorful star fish, some cool geological formations, and the most colorful and vibrant coral we have ever seen snorkeling. And we even decided that we were maybe glad that diving hadn['t worked out as the dive boat was anchored right were we were, and it didn't go very deep so we were able to see mostly all the same things. Granted, by that time they would have been on their second dive at least, and second dives are shallower than first dives, so their first dive may have been amazing. But snorkeling was free (since we took our own gear with us) and it was still great. We had planned on jsut leaving our stuff on the beach while we snorkeled so we didn't take any cameras with us or anything, so not a lot of pictures to document our Huatalco experience.
Acapulco was next. We didn't have a lot of expectations for Acapulco, we only knew we were interested in seeing cliff divers. So we just took a city tour. Our guide took us all over. There is the new Acapulco were the wealthier people live, and the old Acapulco. We got to see both.
Since the city is all mountains there were tons of very pretty views!
There were lots of fairly famous places, such as the Copacabana. (Did you know that was in Acapluco? It is in the picture left of the McDonals picture.) Several times we would see 8 people stuffed into little sedans. There were street performers (for real street performers, they would dance in the street in front of your car while stopped at a red light.) They had McDonals, Hard Rock, and Planet Hollywood. All their taxis were old Volkswagon Beattles. And of course, they ahd churches.
The cliff divers were really quite fascinating. They would climb down into the water, swim 20 feet over to the cliff, and then climb the 100 foot cliff in their bathing suits, with no shoes or anything. Then dive into the water, often doing flips and such on the way down! Before they dive they kiss Mary and say a little prayer.
A cool thing in Acapulco was a group of native dancers and musicians who put on a folk show in the ship theater. It was very entertaing - I loved everything about it, the music, the dancing, the costumes, the people - so fun!
Our final stop was Cabo San Lucas. We spent almost our entire time their diving, which was great and what we most wanted to do, but we really wished we had had a few more hours. If we had we would have walked out to the arch. I guess once every 20 years or so the water receeds in such a way it is possible to get out to the famous Cabo arch entirely on land. We did dive near it, but it would have been cool to walk out and under it. Still we got to see it, and we got to dive. Some of our favorite things we saw diving were the sandfalls (like waterfalls, but reversed, because you are 100 feet under water and it is the sand that is falling because the ocean floor is super steep - wish I could have videod it for ya), huge schools of very coloful fish, rays, and eel, and jelly fish. We really enjoyed our dives and it was good to get some dives in since it had been a year and a half since our last dives. (In the diving world it is prefered to not go more htan a year between dives, but it happens.)
The port at Cabo isn't very big so to get to shore you have to be taken on these smaller boats. On our way to shore we saw the boats of some incredibly wealthy people (are you kidding me, a private boat not only big enough but actually having its own helicopter), sea lions swimming, and pelicans hanging out on boats.
Here are some of the views we saw while on our way to our dive sites.
And the famous arch, as we left Cabo.
So that is it, two weeks of fun. Two weeks of lots of eating. Two weeks of seeing new places. And two weeks of getting to be with Ryan all day, every day. I absolutely went through withdrawls as I returned to normal life. Not that my normal life is bad. My every day life is likely better than some people's vacations, so I'm not complaining, but lets just say that when it comes time to retire, I will welcome it!
