I'll start with the bad...there was a lot of down time with absolutely nothing to do on the ship. The boat was only allowed to stay in Costa Rica for 5 days so when we boarded we had one day at port then had to sail down to Panama to get out of the country then come back. That was about a day and a half. The activities director on the boat was lame and didn't have anything going on during the day on the boat. I'm not much of a lay around in the sun kinda person (especially since it was hell hot there) so I found myself bored.
Next, our room lost it's a/c and since it was hell hot sleep was impossible. It took them 2 days to finally move us to a new room. This room was smaller and on a lower level on the other side of the ship, also, it was a used room and had a soppy wet floor. This wasn't too terrible because it was cold in there. The next morning our steward asked us to move our baggage and when I told him about the floor and asked for a different cabin he told me that we could keep our stuff in the other cabin, but had to pack it all up. So, we slept in one cabin and then had to make the "walk of shame" from one end of the boat to the other in our jammies with bed head back to our other room to get our clothes and shower (not to mention we were now living out of a packed suit case).
We had grand plans of scuba diving, but the scuba guy seemed more interested in getting "some" rather than fixing the problems we encountered with the dive dingy. Apparently it got a hole in it and he wasn't able to fix it. Some how, though, it was fixed by the last day of the cruise...whatever. So, no diving.
We were rarely in a place that was deep enough to dock at so we were shuttle boated from the ship to our ports. We found ourselves, on several occasions, waiting up to 45 min in the hell hot sun to get picked up and returned to the ship after our excursions.
The travel time from the port to the excursions was usually an hour or more one way (our white water trip travel time was 5+ hours round trip, plus 2 hours of rafting)...this left little time to do more than one activity or explore the ports. We got totally hosed on the white water day because that was the port with the most stuff to see. There was a place that we wanted to have dinner at, but because of the 7 hour tour plus nearly an hour to get picked up we had to forfeit the dinner :o(.
OK - to the good...We met some really cool people, everyone on the boat were great! I guess mostly cool people go on windjammer...LOL. Costa Rica is gorgeous!! I'd love to go back and see more of the country. The food on the boat was mostly good. The excursions were mostly good...we did the canopy zip line tour and got rained on, we did a waterfall hike and just missed getting rained on, white water rafting with more rain (my favorite adventure) was kick ass!! The rapids were class 2 - 4 and the drive to the put in was class 4 -5!! Kayaking, snorkeling and most importantly, DRINKING! :O)
I have a ton more pics that I will try to put up later, but here are a couple from our adventures...first, zip line tour...second (obviously) our kick ass white water rafting trip. We plan to make a trip to GA in the near future for another one if anyone would care to join us.
I wouldn't personally recommend the Windjammer cruise, but the majority of the people on our boat were repeat customers, who told us to give it another try. I'm reluctant to spend the money but have sent a letter to Windjammer in hopes of getting a discount to come back and try again.
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