Manuel Antonio National Park

We woke up early this morning to blue skies!!! Yay! After a breakfast of rice and beans (again, very much like Jamaica), we jumped in the car and drove to Manuel Antonio National Park. We were greeted by some spider monkeys in the trees along the road!! So cute!

Although Manuel Antonio is Costa Rica's smallest national park, the diversity of wildlife in its 6.83 sq km (3 sq mi) is unparalleled with 109 species of mammals and 184 species of birds.There are also four beaches contained within the limits of the park.

When we arrived, we found a guide to take us through the park. The awesome thing about the guides is that they have big binocular telescopes to help you view the wildlife. I'm really glad we did this, as our guide had a much better eye for spotting well-camouflaged iguanas and lizards than we did!

We saw the large black spiny-tailed iguana and the green iguana, which both looked really cool! There were large purple and red crabs hanging out on the forest floors, and lots of little hermit crabs on the beaches. Green walking sticks, cute little green tree frogs, and spiders the size of your hand hung out in the low leaves. Turkey vultures and red-headed woodpeckers soared above. We even saw white-faced spider monkeys playing and eating in the tree tops! It was so neat to watch them jump from branch to branch and hang by their tails. The BEST part though was seeing sloths, both the two-toed and three-toed species!! Seeing a sloth in the wild was something I never thought I'd see in my life! 

When we parted ways with our guide, we continued on to do a loop hike on one of the points for some neat lookouts over the ocean. Then we enjoyed some peanut butter and jelly on corn tortillas for lunch on the beach (yummy, yay backpacker meals!) before swimming and cooling off in the Pacific Ocean. Being on this beach reminded me of The Phantom, an old movie from my childhood about a superhero in a purple suit that takes place in a jungle. The beach we were on had white sands and turquoise blue water, but the best part was that the jungle was surrounding us and came right up to the shores of the beach!

After our day at Manuel Antonio, we jumped in the car to head out of Quepos. We stopped in Jaco the surf town on the way out for dinner, where I had a delicious (and cheap!) tuna steak and spinach salad! We stayed in Jaco to watch the sunset at the beach. It was totally worth it because we not only got a vividly colorful sky, but also a fully arched double rainbow! Whoop! We continued our drive in the dark over the mountains, and luckily our route was clear and paved. We still have yet to experience any terrible roads (knock on wood). We stopped in Carari for the night at kind of a sketchy hotel... after we checked in and got in our rooms, they came up and asked if we had an alarm on our car. Yeah apparently this isn't the safest of towns.... 

Our plan tomorrow is to head to Tortuguero, a village on the edge of a National Park that can only be accessed by boat or by plane. Travis studied the area for school seven years ago and has always wanted to go. So, we've decided to make the trip. We'll see where it takes us!