Manuel Antonio

This past weekend I went to Manuel Antonio with some other volunteers from my program. Manuel Antonio was not my choice since it is the most visited tourist attraction in Costa Rica and was bound to be full of tourists. However, I think no matter where you visit in Costa Rica it´s bound to be beautiful. I was travelling with 2 women who are in my spanish classes, Kendall and Jamie. They are both school counsellors from Seattle and are about 45 and 30 respectively. They´re both very nice and we get along well despite the age difference. Our spanish speaker of the trip was Paul, a student in the intermediate class. He is an English teacher living in Spain but originally from Wales. The four of us hired a car to drive us for the 3 hour trip to Manuel Antonio. The driver was really great and stopped the car at all these cool places along the way. We stopped at a bridge with all these crocodiles in the water below, and he took us to a nice beach along the way as well. When we got to Manuel Antonio we split up. The 2 school counsellors are only here for 2 weeks total and were looking to pamper themselves a little so they stayed in an expensive hotel with a pool and ocean view. Paul and I found this great hostel pretty close to the others hotel which also had an amazing view and a great long porch with hammocks so you could just hang out and enjoy. It was $15 a night to stay there too so it was great. Oh and they had warm showers! I´d say the only downside of hostels is fighting for the bathroom in the morning. That night, we all went out for dinner at the Aeroplane restaurant which is literally built around an old nicaraguan airplane that crashed years ago. It had a really nice open-air atmosphere and good American food which was a nice change after rice and beans for a week. That night, two other girls, Julia and Vanessa, joined us in Mauel Antonio at the hostel and we all shared a room (yay bunk beds).

The next morning the four of us staying at the hostel got a super cheap pancake breakfast (yum) before we took the bus to Manuel Antonio national park. The park is so beautiful and full of these tropical beaches with really warm water. I wasn´t expecting it to be so small though. Compared to Canadian park standards it´s really just dinky. The two girls who joined us the night before were only staying until 2:00 that day because one was catching a flight home later that night. They wanted to just hang out the beach until they had to leave so we swam and tanned for a while. It is really hot on the beaches. Wow. Swimming was not optional, you would roast if you didn´t. The waves were just unreal. I haven´t really swam in the ocean much so swimming in big, salty waves was pretty new to me. After an hour or two the 2 school counsellors managed to leave their pampered existence at their hotel and joined us at the beach. Julia and Vanessa decided to stay at the beach while the rest of us went to explore the park. We hiked up this trail called the Mirador (the view) through the jungle. It was kind of a steep trail and was about 1Km long so there were less people on it which was nice. We saw lizards and weird bugs and monkeys! We came across this big group of people taking pictures and Paul, who was a bit ahead of us, calls out loudly, "oh look, monkeys!" That was embarrasing and of course the monkeys went farther into the trees for a while but they did come back out so I got some good photos. The trail ended with this platform high in the trees with an amazing view of the Pacific coast.

After leaving the park, we had wonderful authentic Mexican food in Costa Rica at this restaurant called Dos Locos, which you could tell was geared towards locals and not tourists. I had chili in a sour dough loaf, yum. Then we caught the tourist bus back to Atenas. It took only about 2.5 hours and really was pretty good.