Today was another early start because we are driving to Manuel Antonio State Park to see the wildlife and the beach.
Manuel Antonio is a national wildlife park located on the Pacific coast and is littered with many animals you don’t see many other places.
We parked outside the park and paid for parking…good to do where there is someone to watch your car because it could get broken into. We didn’t even have to leave the parking lot before Sara and Bob were negotiating for a guide for the park.
View from parking area
We paid for the guide and then the guide walked us over to get our park tickets.
The guides know the park and what animals are around in the morning. The animals are also more active in the morning and later in the afternoon, in the heat of the day they find a place to chill out.
We start walking in and see some frogs and small animals…
and then we come across this guy – a 3 Toed Sloth
You know we use the work sloth to describe people who are really lazy but with caught this guy at the right time – because they only move a couple of times a week to go to the bathroom or mate :).
Video of Sloth in the tree
The guide we hired was not too energetic…Let me explain what I mean. Donovan was finding all kinds of wildlife. We he found this frog so he brought it over to have our guide tell us what it was…
Wait for it, wait for it…he paused and thought and then said “Rainforest Frog” – Sara and Bob lost it laughing and made us all start laughing…it was so profound!
There were some smaller animals too.. like this owl concealing itself on the ground here..when I first looked in this direction I didn’t see it at all.
We walked down the path some and then came across a ton howler and squirrel monkeys playing in the tree’s high above us.
The white faced monkeys however were very social and wanted to get into everything. This guy was with his buddies by the beach and stole a bag that someone had left on the ground and took it up into a tree and threw everything out looking for food…
After seeing the rest of the park we were ready to play on the two beaches that are available.
This one had the least amount of people on it and a good set of waves to play in…Sara and I put on our goggles and went for a swim out in the ocean. The water was great, by the end of the swim it was almost too warm 🙂
It was an awesome day for all of us.. and on the way home we were all starved so we stopped in Jaco (Ha Ko) to have dinner. We were eating more and more at the local places so we walked into this place and sat down.
Most of us ordered a form of Comida with chicken or Steak and it was cheap and filled you up. We saw this same basic dish all over the place…
Not too excited with the purple cabbage but the plantains were cooked awesome..Yum!
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