A beautiful sunny morning initiated our day at the Osa Peninsula on the Pacific side of Costa Rica. We walked the trails and explored the beachside on horses for close to three hours. While exploring the beach, horseback riders had a fabulous encounter with several scarlet macaws (Ara Macao), that inked the sky red when we saw them flying; their vibrant colors were hard to miss and easy to enjoy. The rest of our travelers who decided to walk had a wonderful opportunity to find amazing animals like the brown- throated three-toed sloth (Bradypus variegatus), Tamandua anteater (Tamandua Mexicana), howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata) and Central American spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi).
In the afternoon we repositioned the ship to the Corcovado National Park, an area with a very intense biodiversity and recognized worldwide as one of the best places for biological research, since the forest has been kept pristine for many years due to the inaccessibility to this area (no roads). This national park is known to have at least 140 species of mammals, 367 species of birds, 117 species of amphibians, and over 6,000 different species of insects.
Our visit today to the Corcovado National Park gave us a mixture of good feelings: we swam in a river very close to a waterfall, we watched spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) and lots of insects. And on our way back to the ship we noticed there were Pantropical spotted dophins (Stenella attenuata) swimming in the area surrounding the ship. This national park will definitely bring a lot of good memories to all of us. In the late afternoon the ship sailed towards Drake’s Bay to spend the night in that calm and nice bay.
