Today was our final “sea” day which means no stopping at a port today. Here are a few things we learned about South America. The toilets flush backwards… as in, they swirl the other direction when they flush. It is dark at 6pm every day, 365 days a year. They have 12 hours of daylight 365 days a year. The country and the people overall are poor but their shores are lined with Asian based banks like The Bank of China. I’ve already said the Brazilians onboard and in the shops have been rude. Brazilians love to hate Argentinians and Argentinians hate to love Brazilians is a “known” saying around here. Frankly, I don’t think the Brazilians like anyone. Today on the boat overheard speaker they announced “Happy Hour – Buy 6 coffees, get 6 free” ... read more

IIhabela, Brazil is a small jungle island. We arranged for a tour of the island which included a visit to a waterfall but the guide was only available in Spanish or Portuguese so Costa asked us to take another excursion where they could provide an English-speaking guide. We agreed. We were told we would be taking a jeep tour through the jungle, to wear lots of bug spray due to mosquitos and then we would be transferred to a beach where we would board a Schooner (a long pirate-like boat) back to the port. I will preface this excursion by saying that I was interested in this excursion last year many months ago but it said we had to swim from the Schooner to the beach and Kamie didn’t want to do that. This time, the ... read more

Let’s talk about this ship and about this cruise overall. We are on an 8-night/9-day cruise on the Costa Fortuna which holds just over 2,000 passengers when at full capacity which it is not. The drinks available are Sprite, Coke, Coke Zero and Fanta. They do have some sort of canned disgusting mango/peach/I-don’t-know-what tea and canned, disgusting lemongrass tea. There is no other tea on the ship that I can find. I know these people drink tea and use tea bags but I don’t know where the hot water is or I’d be brewing my own tea and making an iced tea. There is no iced coffee (except what I made one day that was not good). There are constant espressos. Every bar has a gigantic espresso machine. I did see cappuccino on the menu one ... read more

It’s been over 48 hours since I wrote a blog post but it feels like 4 or 5 days. We are on the ship. I will back-up and tell everything we’ve went through to get here. It’s A LOT. For starters, let’s back-up to the night we spent in Miami because Kamie has a funny tale to tell… he was outside smoking and the hotel airport shuttle drove-up and the driver proceeded to back into a lady’s car. The driver pulled-up and stayed in the shuttle van… she came outside… he still didn’t get out..… so Kamie told on him! The shuttle driver denied it! There was a shouting matching in Spanish between the shuttle bus driver and the lady (everyone in this area of Miami speaks Spanish as their primary language). She didn’t have too ... read more

We are leaving for South America this week! Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay to be exact. How did this trip come about? On July 4th last year we booked this trip after we received an email about discounted 2023 cruises. Kamie’s goal is to step foot on as many continents as possible and South America had been on our radar for years. We booked an 8-night, 9-day cruise with Costa Cruises. Costa Cruise Lines is owned by the Carnival Corporation and it’s their Italian line of ships which caters to Europeans (mainly Italians) not Americans. This cruise will be different than anything we’ve experienced previously. Basically, we’ve read that anywhere from 3 to 15 percent of the passengers will speak English, most will speak Italian, and everything on the ship is listed or spoken in five languages ... read more