The journey to Manuel Antonio in Costa Rica is not as easy as to other places. Often, a short distance that normally takes 1-2 hours can quickly become 5-6 hours. They take everyone who stands on the roadside, even if they have to stop about 3 times within 150 meters. Air conditioning is mostly just a dream. We made our way to Manuel Antonio National Park.
Lots of animals, a beautiful jungle, and dreamy beaches await us. Muriel has been here before. Our hostel was a dream. A huge swimming pool.
The so-called dormitories were all small white houses with 4-5 bunk beds inside, including air conditioning, yesss... It was up to 38 degrees hot. We thought of jumping into the pool as quickly as possible, but unfortunately it was almost warmer than the air.
So the food was good.
The next day, in the evening, we booked our first tour in the park. We were picked up at 6pm and went on a night tour. Equipped with flashlights, we walked through the jungle with our guide, Rudolf. Typical Spanish name. 70% of the jungle inhabitants are nocturnal, so you can see more animals at night with a bit of luck than during the day.
There were many frogs.Even spiders came out...And other animals too...If you shine an ultraviolet light on a scorpion, you can find it immediately. This is NOT edited.Costa Rica is one of the few countries where the jungle is growing, not shrinking. 25% of the country's land is protected zones. They also have 5% of the world's animal species, which is a lot considering the size. They take good care of their land, as we quickly noticed. Unlike other countries, there is very little litter around. Back to the night tour. Our guide showed us many animals and gave us very interesting information. Among other things, various frogs, spiders, lizards, iguanas, insects, and plants. However, we haven't seen the famous sloths yet. They are neither day-active nor night-active. They sleep for 6 days straight and only come down once a week to do their business. There is also a high risk for them because they cannot escape from their enemies. They are just extremely slow and sleepy. Like some people in the morning... *Name of the editor known. In our group of 6, there was also a mother and son from Italy. He stumbled over every stone, regardless of whether he was walking straight or not. She also fell down twice and scared away all the animals within a radius of 500 meters. We have never seen such clumsy people. But we saw a lot of things and were really happy.
The next day, we booked a day tour in Manuel Antonio National Park.
When we woke up, Muriel wasn't feeling well and decided to stay in bed. We postponed the tour for 1 day and I went to the park alone to walk around on my own. There are over 50 km of trails that you can explore. I already met a cool Swiss person at the beginning who was on vacation for 2 weeks. In the end, we spent the whole day walking through the park together. We saw 8 sloths, howler monkeys, squirrel monkeys, raccoons, various birds including toucans, deer, etc.
All this without a guide.
After a short swim in the lagoon, we slowly headed back.
Muriel was feeling a bit better and we went out for dinner.
We enjoyed the view in the airplane restaurant.
Somehow, it wasn't supposed to land there. Rumor has it that it crashed many years ago when there was no restaurant.Then the next morning we went on the tour. Unfortunately, we were 16 people and only had 1 guide. That was a bit of a hassle. He only had 1 telescope and everyone wanted to look through it. If you were lucky, you could see the animal before it moved away. Well, we still had 2-3 cool perspectives of the animals through the telescope.
And finally, the sloth.We spent some time at the beach and then went back to the hostel.
Our next goal was Monteverde. Another national park in the mountains of Costa Rica. But since we received completely wrong bus information from the hostel, we ended up in the next village where the bus station was and there were no connecting buses anymore. So, after going back and forth and asking various shuttles, we decided to change our plans and go to San José first. There we wanted to visit a volcano and a sloth rescue center. So we boarded a bus to San José.
