About 5 miles up from our hotel is the entrance to Manuel Antonio National Park, home to what a lot of people claim are the nicest beaches on the Pacific coast. It seems to me there's a heck of a lot of nice beaches on the Pacific coast of Costa but who am I to argue. Unfortunately about a mile short of the park entrance we ran into our first encounter of a tourist scam since we've been down here. Costa in general is very courteous and caring about it's tourists so this one sort of shocked us. There was a guy standing in the middle of the road wearing what appeared to be a national park uniform. He was pointing and directing us into a parking lot on the side of the road. Not knowing any better we paid $4 to park there and were told it was only 200 m to the park entrance. Then we started walking and realized it was 200 m to the turn-off to the road that was about another 1 km long that led to the park entrance. Since we were next to the water we walked back down the beach and encountered a lot of pushy vendors trying to rent us beach chairs or sell us coconuts or tourist trinkets. We got back in our car, drove the rest of the way up to the park, passing another 8 or so parking scams along the way, and then found a free parking spot on the side of the road right next to the entrance. Live and learn I guess and as I indicated it was the first time we encountered pushy tourist vendors the whole time we've been here.
I got a couple of pics before we actually got to the park. The first was an iguana fiercely protecting his part of the beach and the second was a couple of playful dogs enjoying a day of sand and salt water.
Once inside the park you have about a mile to walk through a rain forest to get down to the beach. Although we'd seen them in the wild before, this was the first time I got a decent picture of a spider monkey in it's natural habitat.
We had met a guy from Wisconsin the night before while we were out listening to music. He relocated to this area of Costa a couple of months ago and is now a full time school teacher down here. He told us when you first get to the beach at the park there will be a ton of people there. However if you keep walking you get to the other side of the point where there's an even nicer beach with almost no people on it. He was absolutely right. We had about a half mile stretch of beach to ourselves and perhaps 3 other couples.
That last pic of Tina was just before she got in the ocean to cool down, forgot she had her expensive prescription sunglasses on her head, did a dunk underwater and donated her glasses to the Costa Rican Pacific Ocean.
That about wraps it up for this day other than to say so long from Tina and Tom productions.
I got a couple of pics before we actually got to the park. The first was an iguana fiercely protecting his part of the beach and the second was a couple of playful dogs enjoying a day of sand and salt water.
Once inside the park you have about a mile to walk through a rain forest to get down to the beach. Although we'd seen them in the wild before, this was the first time I got a decent picture of a spider monkey in it's natural habitat.
We had met a guy from Wisconsin the night before while we were out listening to music. He relocated to this area of Costa a couple of months ago and is now a full time school teacher down here. He told us when you first get to the beach at the park there will be a ton of people there. However if you keep walking you get to the other side of the point where there's an even nicer beach with almost no people on it. He was absolutely right. We had about a half mile stretch of beach to ourselves and perhaps 3 other couples.
That last pic of Tina was just before she got in the ocean to cool down, forgot she had her expensive prescription sunglasses on her head, did a dunk underwater and donated her glasses to the Costa Rican Pacific Ocean.
That about wraps it up for this day other than to say so long from Tina and Tom productions.
Hasta luego, mi amigo!
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