Manuel Antonio was my second stop in Costa Rica, it’s main attraction is the epynonymus national park, known for its beaches and aggressive monkeys!
It took me FOREVER to drive there- 7 hours, including a lunch stop in sweltering Jaco. Luckily I was staying at a great resort, Gaia, where I immediately relax when I arrived. They greet you with a cold towel and fruit, then your own personal concierge provides a tour of the grounds. In theory your concierge is there for anything you need, but I’m pretty low maintenance, so it was more like just having a friend text me everyday to ask how it was going and if I needed anything. All I needed at that point was to relax by the pool before an early dinner at the hotel (which has a great restaurant called La Luna).
Relaxation central at Gaia!
The next day was wildlife-packed. Gaia has a guide that will take you to Manuel Antonio, and he helped us spot lizards, bats and of course plenty of monkeys. I learned tons of interesting facts about animals- like that monkeys have a fingerprint in their tail, and that hummingbirds have to go into hibernation every night because they are so active during the day!
Our guide and his telescope. You can put your cell phone up to the eye-hole and take a decent photo!
They monkeys in Manuel Antonio are known to be aggressive about stealing food, but this one was just chillin’!
A hummingbird as seen through the telescope.
A “Jesus Christ” Lizard, so named because they walk on water.
We ended our walking tour at the beach, where I spent the next couple of hours relaxing in the shade. Overall the park was nice, but pretty crowded and not the best place for seeing animals in Costa Rica. The beach was also…fine. I’m not sure I consider it one of “the 12 most beautiful beaches in the world,” which it supposedly is.
Me at the beach! Some photo editing makes the water look a lot more blue than it really was. And makes me look slightly less pale than I actually am.
The most popular restaurant in Manuel Antonio is, unexpecedtly, a falafel joint where I grabbed a sandwich for lunch, followed by a quick nap before re-joining the nature guide for a tour of Gaia’s scarlet macaw preserve. The owner of the hotel is helping repopulate scarlet macaws in Costa Rica with a protected breeding area where they’re born and spend about a year and a half before being set free to go where they please. So of course, there are tons of beautiful rainbow-plumaged scarlet macaws flying around, as well as other animals like monkeys and !!sloths!!
Hey cutie!
For dinner I ventured into Quepos where parking is terrifying, because the streets have a two-foot drop off before the sidewalk, so if you are bad at parallel parking, you’re going into a ditch! I ate at a seafood place called Velamar but it wasn’t very good unfortunately.
The next day it was already time to move on! I got in a quick workout at the hotel’s gym (which I’m pretty sure is almost never used. Private gym!) and then relaxed and had some lunch by the pool before driving back to San Jose whose traffic is so horrible and disorganized it really puts the bay area into perspective.
I had a brief overnight stay at Casa Primo CR, a hotel close to the airport. The owner was super sweet and arranged airport transit for me the next day and even made me a sandwich for dinner since there are no restaurants nearby. The next day I was off to the rugged Osa Peninsula!