Blogs from Manuel Antonio, Puntarenas, Costa Rica, Central America Caribbean

We drove to Manuel Antonia Park which is about a 40 minute drive. It's a relatively small park but one that I'd heard a lot about and a place we shouldn't miss. We hired a guide to help us see more animals and take us through the park. She brought along a telescope to see some of the things up close. We saw monkeys, sloths, a poisonous snake, some red eyed frogs (although the one I looked at through her scope just looked like a green blob on the underside of a leaf), and a type of racoon called a kudamonday. We don't have any good monkey photos from this trip...they're very fast and up in the trees. I got a lot of trees but hard to see the monkeys in the pictures I took. We ... read more

I'm not talking about my trip, but Tebow's miracle run. F the coaching staff, I know the guy sucks but call some freakin passing plays. Do I get fantasy points for Brady's 5 TDs and Gron's 3 TDs in the first half? ha. Okay, seriously, my trip is sadly coming to an end. No better way than a true rain forest downpoor. Awesome! Yesterday I took the short 1 hour bus back to Quepos, checked into my king suite at Costa Verde, and hiked down to Manuel Antonio NP. Boring at first, but then some spectacular beaches, fun tide pool hopping, great views, and face to face time with the monkeys, you'll see the pics later. One mile walk uphill to the market for dinner and drinks, and a well deserved solo dinner with a spectacular ... read more

Visiting Manuel Antonio National Park is a highly recommended trip in Costa Rica. In all we spent 3 days in the area. We stayed in Quepos, which is an interesting, basic, low profile Costa Rican town with a mixture of tourists and locals – at the Wide Mouth Frog Backpackers – again, highly recommend this hostel! Two days we took the bus over the giant hill to Manual Antonio township. The first, we visited the National Park. Note here, the park is closed on Mondays and it does get very busy with locals hitting the beach on the weekend. We opted not to do a tour as we felt pretty comfortable spotting wildlife ourselves. We were handsomely rewarded! On the track to the waterfall, we stumbled across a Howler Monkey feeding on fruit in the canopy ... read more

Saturday Madre knocked on my door at about 3:55 even though I had set my alarm for 4:00. I really appreciated that she wanted to make sure I was up. I appreciated even more that she put out breakfast for me. I was fed and ready by 4:30 and went in the cab (they called one of their friends so I would be safe) to pick up Deesa. The cab driver was very nice and dropped us of at the Coca-Cola station in San Jose. Deesa and I both checked various websites and all of them said that the buses to Quepos/Manuel Antonio leave from that station. We got there around 5:00 since we were told to get in like ASAP because the seats sell out quickly. There was no ticket booth there, so we had ... read more

As we were going to stick around in both Quepos and Manuel Antonio National Park for 4 nights, we decided to get a half decent place to stay that was in-between the two of them (they are about 7km apart from each other). Mimos Hotel was where we had pre-booked to go, and when asked in the reservation form if we had any special requests, we noted that we would love a balcony and a view of the sea if it was at all possible. What we didn’t realise until our reservation email was replied to, was that Mimo’s didn’t have a sea view! Not only was it about a kilometre from the sea, but there was also half a rainforest in front of the hotel stopping us from admiring the sea vista as well! This ... read more

Hello! Long time, no talk. This week was my first week of classes! Well lets just say i didn't get much out of my classes and by that I mean I didn't really know what was going on in my three classes with fast talking Costa Rican teachers, confusing syllabus, and other costa rican students. Let me paint you a picture... I meet my friend Brandon to walk to our first tico class, we get there kind of late so we have to sit on the front row.. awesome. There are like six other US students from my group in the class too but the room is mostly full of other Costa Rican students. The professor finally arrives and says that there is too many people here and goes back to get the role to see ... read more