Up the Coastline

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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 (I like these little fellas for their gorilla like face and vegetarian eating habits!). Shortly after we saw our first Three Toed Sloth, just moving about SLOWLY, upside down, in a tree. Then some tiny bats roosting on a tree trunk. Down at the beautiful Manuel Antonio Beach we saw a family group of Capuchin Monkeys, hanging about, grooming each other. The cutest was a very human like mother cuddling her baby.







Unfortunately, we also saw some poor tourist (and tour guide) behaviour. First rule of observing wildlife, don’t distract the wildlife from their normal patterns – broken severely by rude guides and people shaking branches, whistling and calling to gain the attention of the monkeys... all to get that ‘perfect shot’! Second rule of observing wildlife, never feed the wildlife! Not only does it reduce a wild animals ability to forage and feed itself in the wild, it can lead to aggressive behaviour (which we witness) and most importantly, it isn’t the natural diet of the animal so ultimately it is unhealthy! Needless to say, if you are on your way to Manuel Antonio, don’t feed the monkeys!







Aside from that, the beach and the views were beautiful. We also saw a crab eating racoon, another white nosed coati, howler monkey, three toed sloth (a little bit confused hanging from an electricity line), a ton of birds and interesting plants. We had 2 x 1 cocktails, then dinner at a fabulous reggae cafe. The following day we hit the beach, all day. It was great!

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