Costa Rica! #4 - Manuel Antonio National Park

We spent Saturday at Manuel Antonio National Park, which is about an hour down the coast from us. The drive was so unbelievably gorgeous!! As always, I couldn't help taking a ton of wild, blurry shots out the window...only to have zero of them turn out cool. But I keep doing it anyway, because every 300 pictures or so, one somehow manages to be a goodie. The town outside of the park, Quepos, is a very resort-y town, bustling with little shops and backpackers and restaurants made out of things like airplanes and trains and boats. We had to stop and take a few pictures of this one.

The restaurant wasn't open yet, so we weren't able to peek inside.

The beach right before you head into the park was jam-packed with tourists, which made me so grateful for our little beach, where there are never more than 5 people at any given time.

Whenever I see a gigantic tree, and make Lance stand by it for comparison, it never ends up looking impressive. Maybe my next fancy camera will have a feature that captures the giant-ness of things.

Costa Rica has the most beautiful plants, flowers, trees, bushes, shrubs, etc. Everything is so colorful, and big, and...weird-looking.

Not long after entering the park we saw an animal high up in a tree. Even though it was hard to see from so far, I swore it was a sloth. A guide came by a minute later and verified that it was, indeed, a 3-toed sloth. We were pretty stoked. A sloth!!

I think I inherited my dad's love of taking pictures of mushrooms. He would have loved all of these - they were amazing!

This picture is having technical difficulties and I can't get it to turn the right way.

There were also a ton of cool spiders everywhere - their webs were so big and intricate!

Costa Rica has a ton of these little clusters of bamboo - bamboo trees, I'll call them. Some of them are as tall as a 4-story building!

This tree was nuts - it had spikes! Like a thorny rose!

We've been hoping for a giant centipede sighting, which is Lance's dream in life. I thought for a second that this might have been a small one, but...it was a caterpillar.

This picture was taken with the GoPro - I was excited to see that it takes nice pictures! It was fun to catch a glimpse of the ocean every once in awhile while trekking through the jungle.

 Our first little hike took us to this viewing platform of the ocean.

Our next hike took us to this cool little beach. There were lots of fun things to explore.

It's so fun to sit and stare at a pile of rocks, waiting to see which ones turn into hermit crabs.

Lance found a million of these little tiny ones.

This whole giant boulder was covered in them.

The guy with the Kid Rock hair looked just like Young Smeagol. We were having a good giggle over it, but were trying to be covert about sneaking a picture.

Our first monkey sighting! A nearby guide said that they were howler monkeys.

This little gang of racoons was thieving its way around the beach, getting into everybody's stuff. People would run towards them, yelling and clapping, and they wouldn't even bat an eye - they'd just continue about their business until someone threw sand at them.

Here's a little video of them using a little team work to pilfer through the basura.

It was so weird to see racoons on a beach in the middle of the Costa Rican rain forest! I'd never seen a racoon so close before, so even though this is an animal we have at home, I'm totally adding it to my list of creatures.

More howler monkeys.

 There were lots of beautiful hikes to beautiful beaches.

Like this one.

On our way out it had just stopped raining, so every time the monkeys swung from tree to tree, you'd hear this big pitter patter of rain falling off the leaves, so it was much easier to spot them. This little guy put on quite the high-wire show.

It was so crazy to watch him hang from his tiny feet to eat off the trees!

He used his tail like an extra limb, helping him keep his balance.

You'd have to zoom in to see it (just left of the center of the photo), but there was a big old bright red crab in the middle of the forest, super far from the ocean, which seemed weird.

About here we started to hear the howler monkeys, which is the scariest sound ever! It's like a cross between an angry wild boar that's chasing you with the intent to eat you, and a velociraptor, and a bear.

Here's a video of them (well...the sound of them) - you'll have to turn your volume up to hear them.

I didn't take a picture of the whole tree, because the lighting was bad, but it was so weird! It had long, skinny, black spikes all over the whole tree, and had fruit that looked kind of like apricots. Here are a couple of the branches that had fallen down. So bizarre!

Speaking of bizarre, look closely at this picture: It's a big old tree that's been uprooted and is laying on its side...and then two other trees are growing straight up out of the side of the fallen tree. So nuts.

Can you spot the lizard, on top of that green leaf? We had fun following him around, watching him jump all over everything.

Another one of those cool spiders. Look how huge its web is!

On the way out of there, we stopped back at that plane restaurant and took a few more pictures. The food was too pricey for us though, so we didn't eat there.

Inside the fuselage was a bar. So cool!

There's a huge seating area under the wing.

With the most amazing view ever!

The only one of my 30 window shots that's un-blurry enough to see anything. :)