Costa Rica - Manuel Antonio

Hiking and Beaches all in One

Manuel Antonio national park is a two hour drive away and promised hiking, animals and beaches.  We hopped in our car after breakfast and headed along the coast on a two lane highway.  The sixty miles took twice as long as the hour they should've, mostly due to trucks struggling on the uphills.

The park sits alongside the Pacific and is made up of dense jungle and three beaches.

Of course, we didn't drive direcly there, we stopped at a grocery store then we stopped at a bakery in Quepos, a small town near the park.

We noticed a theme emerging.  A lot of eateries in Costa Rica have open air seating with a great view.

We munched on banana bread and drank coffee and took in the view.  When we arrived at Manuel Antonio we parked near the public beach and hired a guide.

Without a guide it's probable that we wouldn't have seen much in this thick jungle.

The guides know exactly where the critters are and as you hike they stop, search in the trees and then focus a large binoculars on a tripod for you to look.

I tried to take photos through the binoculars but they didn't come out well.  This is a two toed sloth sleeping on a branch.  We also saw the three-toed variety.

We saw a wide array of creatures.  Frogs, mud-loving crabs, giant neon-colored grasshoppers, furry black caterpillars who arranged themselves in a tight formation high up on a tree branch so as not to stand out to the predators.

The howler monkeys were more shy than their capuchin cousins, who were happy to eat on a fence post, right in front of us.

Ditto the raccoons, this one eating Doritos.  They search you on the way in for any kind of chips - you're not supposed to bring them into the park but clearly someone cheated.

After two hours of hiking and animal sighting our guide Rodrigo left us at one of the beaches.

We were too ambitious for our own good - we skipped these beaches since they were too crowded and followed a path on the park map to a much more secluded beach.

We hiked an additional hot, long 45 minutes only to be led to an observation deck that didn't allow access to the beach.  We were trying to get to the beach in the far left of this photo.  Not ones to give up easily, we checked the map and noticed there was a path that led there.

We began to hike through the jungle, following flight after flight of wooden stairs.  This was a trail that was more up than down.  It was about 90 degrees and humid and I began to regret skipping lunch.  I'd not eaten since breakfast seven hours earlier and I was running on empty.  I fantasized running into the cool ocean.  My legs were aching and I was totally soaked with sweat.  We kept going up and up.  Where was the down part of this hike I wondered.  Then, the trail just ended.  We had hiked to a viewpoint onto "Sawtooth" isthmus.

It was beautiful.  If only I could jump onto a long slide leading directly into the ocean. 

We took in the view for ten minutes and then we decided to hike back to the original beach we'd started from.

It was close to 3pm and we had it almost all to ourselves.  We waded in beyond the breakers and floated happily, cooling off.