Nature overdose in Costa Rica

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Manuel Antonio is the smallest national park but the most famous in Costa Rica for its abundance of wildlife, unspoiled beaches and crocodiles…but more about that later. Driving across Costa Rica to get there was thankfully not too bad a journey as the road was actually paved for most of the way! You would not believe what a small miracle that actually is.

Checking into our hotel (obviously a luxury resort! Well a three star hotel but it had three swimming pools and our room was the size of Raffles unfortunately without the pole that we know and love so well!), we immediately get down to exercising. Can you believe that actually we have taken up exercising everyday for an hour to try and trim down some of excesses that we have enjoyed over the last 4 months (as we write this almost three weeks later the last three days have been spent drinking heavily and not exercising in that sense of the word…..)

The next day we took a guided walk through the park as without one it is almost near impossible with the untrained eye to actually spot anything in the jungle. As we slowly walk through the forest, the humidity hits almost 90%, our t-shirts are immediately drenched in sweat - not so attractive, but then again the group was made up of older married couples and annoying American families that even with the guide setting up a telescope, complain about not being able to see the wildlife. If they bothered to stop the whining and actually open their eyes they would be pros at spotting wildlife with all the training we have now had over our traveling.

Seeing golden orb spiders, sloths, monkeys, snakes, bats, crabs, and crickets we are almost wildlifed out! But have lots of pictures for you to enjoy! We also walk along beautiful beaches and just spend the rest of the day melting in the heat. Having had enough of the sweat pouring down our faces we try to find the best feature of our hotel….an over 18s pool!!! No children running around and ruining our sun time! We get to the pool and find a heavenly pool apart from the fact that its surrounded by sickly in-love couples so we plonk ourselves snap bang in the middle of them all and settle down for a quiet afternoon! Just as we settle in, a huge iguana decides to settle down next to us and tries to chomp through Innz’ yellow flip flops thinking it’s a lovely flower!!

After a relaxing couple of days we decide to head over to the next destination to fulfill one of Innz’ long time dreams. Along the way we pass a river famous for crocodiles. One of our friends from the Venezuela told us to make sure that we buy some chicken to feed them! Being the gypsies that we are we bought the cheapest cuts of chicken (chicken wings) to feed them! Throwing them down we manage to aim the chicken wings directly on top of them but because the chicken wings are so small, the poor crocodiles have trouble trying to pick up the tiny pieces of meat from the ground as their mouths are too big!! We are so horrible!! ;o)

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