So about a week and a half ago I went out to the Manuel Antonio region of the country, spending about basically 3.5 days (after accounting for travel time) seeing what the area has to offer. There's quite a bit. It's also stunningly beautiful, as the below demonstrates to the best of my camera's ability:
For those of you who don't know, Manuel Antonio is one of the smaller yet more famous national parks here in Costa Rica. Originally an island, millions of years of sediment brought in by the tides eventually turned the thing into a peninsula. Good for tourists, bad for animals. For the most part. There seems to be a real commitment to preserving the area, and really there's a lot of the park you're not supposed to run around.
There's still enough to occupy you for a day or two, though. The beaches are gorgeous and were a lot less crowded than I was expecting (granted things didn't get all that busy till the end of our stay), and if you're willing to go "at your own risk" there are some steeper trails that lead to still more beaches that fewer people visit. On top of that there's a roughly 1-hour hike (longer if you're a camera fiend) that takes you through a bit more of the wood. I sadly didn't get a chance to do so, but will try and get back there before the rainy season kicks off. The water was like a bloody bathtub, and I found myself hanging out a few feet underwater as much as possible to take advantage of the cooler temperature.
I highly recommend either getting a guide or subtly poaching another group's. These guys are good, and will spot things that you most likely won't unless you're a trained naturalist. They also carry these handy low-power telescopes that allow you to take pictures through them if you're carrying a P.O.S. point-and-click like I am, which is nice. Be prepared for crowded trails if you go during the dry season, but the plus of that is that the increased number of guides will make it easier for you to see stuff if you're not up for spending the money. It also rains less.
Remeber to wear sunblock. I forgot to do my back and wound up with a hideous sunburn that took days to heal.
There are a number of other activities out in the area, many of which you can book through a hotel. In addition to the park I wound up doing a canopy tour and an ATV tour, which I'll briefly run through below.
The canopy tour was about a half-day trip with a bit of light walking uphill to reach the ziplines. They were great fun. I forget exactly how many lines there were, but I think around a dozen along with a tarzan swing and two bits of rappelling. The rappelling was really the trickiest bit but that doesn't say much. If you've been through a ropes course or canopy tour before you know all about the safety measures that keep you from falling to your squishy death, and if you haven't the short version is that you're tethered to something at all times in case you get a sudden urge to jump, stumble or otherwise leave the 100-plus-foot-high platform. The rappelling is more complicated only because it requires slightly more concentration to ensure you don't catch your shorts (or yourself, if you're silly enough to wear hot pants in the jungle) on fire from letting the rope feed through your hand and over your thigh (as opposed to away from it). And don't touch the ring the rope feeds through. Trust me.
It was really hot, and I can only imagine how lethal it must be with the humidity of the rainy season, but it was worth it. We got lunch at the end of it, which was nice, and the photographers that work with the company are also pretty solid (at $25 for a CD of 100-something photos, they'd better be). Also, they had a butterfly garden where I was able to get maybe 5 good shots due to my camera's technical limitations. It was, however, pretty, and blue morpho butterflies are every bit as impressive in real life as you might imagine. In fact it seems like the things are everywhere here, but seeing them up close (and not fleeing in terror) is pretty damn cool.
The ATV tour was probably my favorite part of the trip. We had to leave the hotel at 7:15am, which was slightly painful after I spent several hours drinking with a couple wedding parties who just happened to be in the hotel and a couple of whose members I'd met the other day on the canopy tour. I spent about 20mins discussing the finer points of beer and wine with some guy from Michigan, but if you know me (or you're a couchsurfer) you know this sort of thing really isn't out of the ordinary. Especially at a bar.
Anyways, getting back on topic. The ATV tour was out in a different part of the jungle from the canopy tour, though geographically they can't have been too far apart. We were given a 5-minute "how to ride ATV's for blithering idiots" crash course, which was a nice refresher since I don't think I've ridden one since before I hit puberty. It's simple enough though, and before too long we were off. Part of the tour took us through the palm plantation. I say the plantation because there's about 30000 acres of palm trees being cultivated for palm oil in a more or less contiguous block, taking up over a quarter of the country. I'll get back to this in a later post, but for now just keep it in mind to help set the scene: dusty, winding trails and irrigation ditches winding through seemingly endless rows of palm trees.
The plantation and the road leading to it were dusty as hell, and I was glad I'd chosen not to wear contacts for this little adventure. You could have planted a tree in the dirt that got on myself and my clothing. The ride itself was fun, though, and there were one or two funny parts. The one that sticks out in my mind is when one of us got held up by a small herd of oxen and their driver because one of the animals decided the middle of the road was a wonderful place to make a baby. Yes, I'm serious. I know I joke a lot, but this is one of those You Can't Make This Shit Up stories. So far as we know, the ox's attempts at siring were unsuccessful.
After we passed through the plantation (and a couple villages), we got to the second part of the tour; the rainforest hike. Whereas Manuel Antonio felt like a park, this felt much more like an honest-to-goodness trek through the jungle. It wasn't especially long or difficult, but that was because our guide took us through the easy trail. Not that I minded. I was too busy taking in the scenery (and ye gods was it pretty). My favorite part came at the end of the trail, where we got to rinse off in a small pond fed by a waterfall. The fall itself was back a ways, and required scaling a slippery-ass rock that likely wouldn't be doable at all in the rainy season, but the end result was breathtaking. It made me wish I'd brought a waterproof camera to get a shot, but at the same time I doubt I'm going to forget it any time soon.
In hindsight, a couple things made a huge difference in how much I enjoyed the ATV tour. First there was the guide, who was entertaining and knew enough about the area that we were able to learn some cool things. Second, and just as important, our group was small. Four of us in total, which makes a bigger difference than you might realize. I wouldn't say I believe I wouldn't have had fun even without those things, but it just made the whole experience that much better.
A couple other quick things: Most of the hotels around Manuel Antonio are pretty much built into the jungle, though there are a few condo-style developments that pretty much clear out the vegetation. I prefer the former. It looks a lot cooler, and it encourages the monkeys to show up.
And oh dear god are there monkeys. I don't know if it was just out hotel having palm trees that fed them, but every day around 4:30 we'd start seeing squirrel monkeys or what I can't help but think of as the "virus monkey" from the movie Outbreak. Other hotels had howler monkeys, which are bigger than the other two and whose howl you might mistake for a dog at first. Sadly there are also vultures, who typically started perching in some of the trees near the pool in the afternoon so they could wait for the monkeys to expose themselves.
Free wifi at the hotel was a huge plus, there's a bar with a plane in it that they insist was involved in gun-running to the Contras (again, dead serious), and there's a restaurant called the wagon with the slogan "Hot Dogs and Beer." If I hadn't been there with my mother, there's a good chance I would have had two or three meals a day there.
Overall it was an awesome trip. There's a reason everyone goes there, but try to avoid going during the week of Valentine's day. Everything's a lot more expensive.
Cheers,
Matt
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