Costa Rica: Day Eight
If there is a gap in photography, it’s because I got super sick our last night in Playa Hermosa; not sure if I had food poisoning or what but I was shocked to wake up with guts. Then, we spent most of a day driving to the last portion of the trip because we spent a good two hours driving around Puntarenas. Highway exit and entrance ramps (and by highway, I mean roads that look like county roads in Ohio) are not necessarily marked. When we arrived at the third leg of our trip, a tiny bungalow in the surf town of Jaco, we were extremely eager to make our way to a Mexican restaurant for lunch and beers.
On our first full day in Jaco, we drove an hour to Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica’s most-visited national park. And when I say most-visited, I mean holy cow are there a lot of people trying to sell you things. We ended up paying for a guided hike in order to spot monkeys, sloths, etc… which we did end up spotting with his help. I would suggest, though, that anyone visiting Manuel Antonio not pay the $20/person for a guide. There are tons of guides walking the paths that carry telephoto lenses with them to show guests animals hiding in the foliage, but this means that you will likely see where the guides are and see most of the animals for yourself. The park being so heavily visited, the animals are not shy of people. Justin and I watched a pair of raccoons take part of a family’s picnic back into the woods with them. We did get to take a self-guided hike with awe-inspiring views of the teal blue waters and take a dip in the ocean. We also saw sloths, capuchins, howler monkeys, spider monkeys, tropical crabs, the poisonous fer de lance snake, deer and lizards.
