18.10.2012 – 18.10.2012  33 °C

We got up bright and sparkly and caught the bus back to the beach to allow us to spend the day wandering thru the beautiful Manuel Antonio NP. This park is rightfully one of the best in CR (if not the world) for spotting wildlife.

We hadn’t even entered the park before we saw a howler monkey perched up a tree. He seemed to be dozing so we kept wandering with a plan for seeing plenty of other creatures. My goals today were to see a Sloth moving (probably not going to happen but I’d love to see one on the move), see more Monkeys, get a good photo of a Raccoon, see a Jaguar (although I’m in two minds about wanting to see a real wildcat), spot a Boa Constrictor.

I think my goal was a bit lofty. I didn’t see a Jaguar or a Boa or a moving Sloth. I did get to see the face of a Sloth though and he was the smiley three toed variety so I was very excited. I got to see more Raccoons than I probably wanted to and White faced Monkeys up super duper close!!!

Actually, there would have been way more wildlife in the park today than humans. Our Sloth was just perched up a tree doing what Sloth’s do… which is to say not much! I did see him move his head so I guess I sort of saw him moving but I didn’t get to take a swinging sloth picture… 🙁 The Raccoons are pretty funny they scavenge food from wherever they can find it so we had quite a few of them come to our bags trying to get some scraps. Apparently, they are even intelligent enough to open up zippers on bags so if you leave them unattended your food is a gonner!

The little white faced monkeys are little rat bags.. They also are happy to steal anything from your bag and don’t discriminate between something that is edible and something that just looks good.. We didn’t have any of our stuff stolen but I could hear plenty of cries of anguish up and down the beach of people who had their stuff stolen!

The beach itself is a picture postcard beach. Beautiful emerald green water, palm tree fringed, white sand beach surrounded by two big jungle covered headlands. The type of beach that is used in Hollywood films for a deserted Caribbean beach. The beach actually wasn’t that busy when we arrived so when we had a swim we were five people out of a total of eleven swimming! The water wasn’t super clear but was very warm. No waves (we’re in a sheltered bay) but it was so nice to just cool off that little bit in such pretty surrounds.

We headed back into the jungle after our swim to see another part of the park. In this part we couldn’t believe our luck, we saw a little white faced monkey up really close playing pranks and a whole family of Howler Monkeys singing and playing in the tree tops. The Howler’s are significantly larger than the white faced little guys and they reminded me more of a cross between an Orang-utan and an ape. Long limbs like an Orang-utan but bigger bodies like an ape. The Howler’s were a fair way away (in fact at first all we could do was hear them we couldn’t actually see the family) so I couldn’t get a good look at them but the noise was enough to convince me that these monkeys are so much bigger than their little pesky cousins.

As we left the park we saw another family of white faced monkeys playing around, an iguana and a turtle. We also discovered the ferry. By the time we exited the park the rain was really pelting down (it had gone from very bright sunlight to pouring rain in a matter of thirty minutes). We actually weren’t too sure where we were heading so we were just following the path trying to keep our gear dry. At the end of the path was a shallow small river with a warning sign about crocodiles and a group of guys with little dinghy boats. At the time we arrived there were no other tourists around, so not knowing how to get out of the park we assumed we needed to take the dinghy to somewhere to  exit. I’m getting in thinking, yep we’ll have to tip the guy a couple of dollars but at least we’ll get out of the park quicker than if we tried to walk around the river. As it turned out the ‘ferry’ was just that… we got in, the guy turned the boat around and landed the boat on the other side of the meter wide river. He then proceeded to try and charge us a thousand collonez each (equiv of $2).. I lost it at that point and refused to pay. Ursula (who is too kind hearted) gave the guy 2 thousand collonez (for the four of us) but I just walked away swearing about not getting ripped off in the back end of no-where… It never ceases to amaze me what people will try and charge tourists… I’m sure if a local came along it would have been a flat fee of $2 for all of us, after all the river is a meter wide, we were about 5 meters from the ocean inlet and I’m dead certain that there are no crocs in this part of the area.. I swear the sign has been put there by the ferry dudes just so they can charge suspecting tourists a couple of bucks each. To put the cost into perspective it cost us 50c each to take the bus twenty minutes from downtown to Manuel Antonio…..

Although I was annoyed at the guy trying to charge us it was a pretty funny moment on the trip.. I’m certain my travelling companions had a great laugh at my expense! 🙂 We had some local Cassado for lunch and headed back to the hotel mid afternoon to have a coffee and a rest before our big night out of Salsa dancing and dinner.

Tonight is our last night as one group. Tomorrow, most of us head back to San Jose to catch aeroplanes to wherever, but the two crazy Dutch boys are hanging around in Quepos for a couple of extra days so tonight was our night to have a great farewell party. And my gosh, did it live up to expectations!

Dinner was a very tasty meal at a local restaurant of Caribbean spiced prawns (some of the best I’ve had this year.. almost Apalachicola standards (almost but not quite)!) before we headed out of town for Salsa lessons. We arrived at this pub to find a couple of pretty good salsa dancers dancing and lots of people eating.. Hmm not a great start.. Allan pulled Ursula onto the dance floor and some random local pulled me out and our salsa experience began! After about twenty minutes Ursula and I decided that the boys needed to join us (they were doing the usual boy thing of hanging around at the bar) so we pulled Marcel and Tom out onto the dance floor. Poor old Marcel didn’t last super long but Tom was a real trooper and spent the whole evening dancing with me (which was fortunate because the instructor totally gave up on me!). Salsa is so much fun.. so much in fact, that I’ve worn two big blisters on my big toes and have a very sore calf muscle! By the end of the night we’d gotten the basics of salsa (and finally managed to get the spins in time to the music) and it really felt like I was actually dancing in time… Tom had worked out how to lead, as he kept reminding me “I’m the boss, Di!” and we could sort of keep to time and started to learn a couple of the more advanced  steps.. Awesome night out! (Thanks partner 🙂 )

The salsa club closed about midnight (we danced for most of that time!) so we all headed back downtown to find another bar to continue our fun night out. First bar we entered was a local joint with bars on the windows. Marcel aptly dubbed this club the prison and we didn’t hang around too long. The other bar in town was pretty much empty so we did what we’ve done every other night that we’ve been out and went crazy.

We continued to practice some of our salsa, and tried to teach Marcel and Tony some of the basics. But the highlight of the night (as it has been every other night we’ve been out) was watching Marcel and Tom do their Dutch thing on the dance floor. I think that every time I hear the song, Gangnam Style (some Korean nightclub song that apparently made it big in the charts this year—if you haven’t seen the film clip you need to check it out.. very amusing!) I’m forever going to picture Marcel and his take off of the dance moves that are featured in the film clip.. No joke, side splitting funny!

We finally left this club around 3am with a plan to find another club in another part of town. By this stage some of us had, had quite a bit to drink (tequila shots tend to have that effect) and our fearless leader was trying to convince us to cook potatoes down in the ocean? Strangely enough, cooking potatoes in the ocean didn’t appeal to any of us, so we declined! We finally arrived at this bar to find it too had closed down for the evening so our last night out came to a quick close.. Oh well, all good things have to come to an end…… 🙂