We really could not believe our weather. There we were in the rain forest area of the world and we didn't get rained on once. It rained when we were on the ship, but never when we were on shore.
Another beautiful day dawned Thursday, April 24, when we arrived in the port of Limon.
Once we were off the ship, we were recruited by this man to be our tour guide for the day. I wanted to go see a banana plantation and he was willing to take us there.
We stopped at this roadside banana stand so he could talk all about the different types and sizes of bananas.
He claimed the smallest bananas are the sweetest. He insisted one of us taste a banana to prove his point. Glen didn't want anything to do with eating a banana. He doesn't eat them at home, why would he eat them at a banana stand in a foreign country?!?
There were two older women traveling in the vehicle with us and they refused to try the so-called delicacy. That left me--the only good sport in the bunch (like my play on word right there?). My verdict...tasted just like a regular banana to me.
It was probably my taste buds all messed up from my illness and the dryness in my mouth from the seasickness patch mixed with the bad taste of the Tamiflu and the cough syrup with codeine. Do you think?
He showed us part of a banana tree starting to grow some bunches of bananas.
Look at those baby bananas.
We were driving down a picturesque, tree-lined country road when all of a sudden the driver skidded to a halt.
The driver and the guide jumped out of the car and started looking up into the trees and pointing. Of course we tourists started doing the same thing...
Look at all those dark spots up in the trees. We were told those are monkeys and sloths. What in the world is a sloth???
We were soon to find out. Further down the road, the driver slowed down to a stop when he saw this man and his sloth just standing there by the side of the road.
Our guide told us that for a dollar we could get up close and personal with the three-toed sloth and even touch it. YIKES!! The old lady sitting next to me wanted to pet the thing. I then became the object between her and the tree-dwelling critter with the strange-looking fur. DISGUSTING!!!
(Here's another quote straight from the internet.) Sloths make a good habitat for other organisms, and a single sloth may be home to moths, beetles, cockroaches, ciliates, fungi and algae.
Not to mention they are an endangered species, so why would any human being want to be handling one of them?
Answer: for a dollar...?!?!??
After more miles of driving, we entered the Del Monte banana plantation.
Out in the banana trees we could see the huge banana bunches had blue bags on them which help protect the bananas against predators and insects.
There were various different-colored strips hanging down from each banana bunch indicating how far along they were in the growing process.
We were instructed to look toward the conveyor system when some bananas were being brought into the processing plant from the field.
It was basically one person doing all the heavy work of pulling about a dozen huge banana bunches using no machinery and just his own body strength.
He had pulled all those bananas in with that rope or cable tied around his waist.
The bananas hang on hooks in the processing plant waiting to move on in the system.
The banana bunches travel into the area where the cutting and washing occur.
There is a black film on the bananas that needs to be washed off. The bananas are cut off the stalk into smaller bunches and put into the bath water.
The bananas process through the system to the other end where they are taken out of the water to dry and be packaged.
This is a picture of the banana bath when all the workers had gone on to lunch.
The bad bananas were sorted and thrown into trucks to be taken elsewhere to be used for baby food and other things. The good bananas were packaged and loaded in containers and taken to the docks to be shipped to various destinations throughout the world.
While we were eating our lunch later on the ship, we enjoyed watching the banana containers being loaded onto cargo ships.
We watched semi after semi bringing their containers of bananas to be picked up off the truck and moved onto the ship. The green ship on the right is loading only banana containers.
We did stop for a minute at a beach after the banana plantation, but the two old ladies showed as much interesting in hanging out on the beach as we did. It was back to the ship for us.
Steven and Patricia had done a zip line excursion and had a really great time doing that. They went to a banana plantation as well.
We shared stories over dinner. The head waiter made a special gluten-free pasta dish for me. It was really good, but I could only eat a small portion of it because he gave me so much.
Look at Glen and me out there on the dance floor learning how to line dance.
It was fun, but the exertion just made me cough all the more.
