If there’s the possibility to ride a train I will take it. Puerto Limon is connected to San Jose by a narrow gauge railway. It no longer carries passengers, except for a few miles through the outskirts of Limon and a little into the jungle, across the Tortuguero Canal.
We ride in restored wooden carriages, snapping pictures of sloths and looking at monkeys high in the trees, and also looking at some of the homes and farms along the tracks until we reach the Canal where we will transfer to a boat to look at more wildlife.
While the railroad is no longer an active passenger line it does carry containers of fruit, lots of containers labeled “Dole” and “Chiquita.”
I traveled the train that I have only recently discovered is called the “Jungle Train,” from San Jose to Limon at age 21 in 1961 on the way from Panama and beyond (S. Pacific, Australia and East Indies0 back to the States. The trip beginning in the morning, was a good twenty hours. It was another time, another world altogether, something out of my Wichita, Kansas childhood fantasies.