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Rio Frio Cruise

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Orange groves along the way to the Rio Frio View of Arenal volcano from my hotel room Now that we are in lower land in La Fortuna, at the base of the Arenal volcano we've moved into a new crop growing region.  Rather than coffee up in the higher elevations its a vast variety of fruit.  We've passed pineapple fields, papaya fields, sugar cane, oranges, mangoes and mangas (mangas are the supersized version of mangoes).  The the three biggest crops they grow with the best bang for the export dollar are pineapple, bananas and coffee.  We didn't see too many banana fields, but there were banana plants tucked around a lot of properties we visited.  Coffee plantations tend to grow a lot because the banana and coffee plants complement each other in the soil I believe.  They had huge papaya tree farms, and we learned that you have to pick the papaya while they're green otherwise the birds will feast and you have no crop to export.  I was also amused th...
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Adios Lima

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Day 15 It's the last day of vacation.  Well, technically since we leave at 12:30 am tomorrow it's the second last day.  But it's a free day until the flight leaves. Catacombs Originally I had thought about doing a city tour. But for less money I could just take a taxi downtown and walk along the ocean so I settled on that instead.  The only thing I missed out on was a tour of the cathedral but I feel like I've seen a lot of churches now. I really wanted to see the catacombs in Lima.  It was an easy cab ride downtown to the main plaza.  The Saint Francis catacombs are also a monastery with around 45 active members.  The catacombs included a guided tour that included much of the church above the catacombs.  And then you descend through the cemetery below.  There are 3 levels with 25,000 remains.  They did have some bones arranged in areas but the part I found strange was that 99% of what they had out was skulls and leg bones.  T...
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Colca Canyon Condors

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Day 13 Strange Dancers Today's big excitement was visiting the Colca Canyon to view condors.  Which we did see.  Only we took the truly tacky tourist route.  We hit up a few scenic viewpoints along the way.  We had a few stops along the way.  The strangest one was a small town where the teenagers do this specific dance in the square every morning.  It involves the boys wearing masks while dressed like girls while they sway around the fountain.  I'm not sure how excited they were to be doing it because it mostly felt like a draw for bringing in tourists.  The square was filled with people selling things, and of course a few ladies and their alpacas.  This stop also had a few opportunities to take a picture with an eagle I believe.  We only seen a few places with birds and most of the tour guides are quite disgusted at the idea of people catching the birds for picture opportunities for a few soles. Our next stop was at another chu...
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