Day 6:
What a great way to spend our last full day in Costa Rica!
After an early breakfast (7am) we met our driver at 7:30 am and started the almost 3 hour drive to Manuel Antonio National Park/beach. The ride was really interesting and our driver made a few stops for us to get pictures and to shop. I had a great time practising my Spanish with the driver, who spoke pretty good broken English. When he got stuck I could put it into Spanish so he understood. I just have to remember not to sound out the "h" when i talk to them. :-)
Our first stop was at a roadside shopping place where we bought a few things before crossing the bridge where we got pictures of all the crockodiles below in the water. They even had someone there feeding them for the tourists. It was really interesting and Jacob got some cool pictures! The crockodiles were huge!
Then he stopped at a couple viewpoints for us to get pictures . One was of Jaco Beach, which is one of the most popular party beaches and the other was of Hermosa Beach which is where they hold championship surfing competitions in July (we will be here for that....yay!) which is a beach with black sand...pretty cool!
We saw everything you could think of today....cities, countryside, mountains, beaches, tourists, ticos, highways, dirt roads, cats, dogs, cows, lizards, monkeys, and sloths. It was amazing!
When we got to the national park/beach we were dropped off by our driver and set up a meeting time before he left. Then we headed into the park. We only had to wait in line about 15 minutes because they have a people limit on how many can be in the park at one time. When people leave they let more people in. It was interesting because while we were waiting we watched a Tico haggle himself down on a necklace from $20 to $9 without the woman saying anything!
Manuel Antonio is a national park with 3 beaches and a nature walk through the woods/rainforest of sorts on the way to the beach. We saw several big lizards, birds, monkeys, and even a sloth heading back up the tree after coming down for his weekly bathroom break. Boy do they move slow!! :-) The monkeys actually came down to the bottom of the trees and at one point there was a monkey about 2 feet away from me on the tree. That was so neat!
The beaches were really cool. We stopped at the first one which is where most of the people go. I placed our blanket under a big tree to be out of the sun and watched Jacob swim for just a little bit before Bob and I joined him. The water was very refreshing after our long walk but the tide was strong. It kept sucking us into the beach/shore and then rolling us back out to sea. If you weren't paying attention you could very easily end up on the other end of the beach by the time it got done!
When we tired of the sun...which was pretty quickly, about an hour was spent at the beach part, we finished our walk through the park stopping to take pictures as we did. The beaches were all quite beautiful and the waves crashing on the rocks made for beautiful pictures.
Once we exited the park we then went to the restaurant on the beach and ate a late lunch before meeting our driver. The ride home was pretty quiet becasue we were all exhausted from the day at the beach in the sun.
We then got back to the hotel, paid and thanked the driver, made arrangements for him to pick us up tomorrow to take us to the airport and then headed to our room.
Jake still wasn't done swimming so I went with him up to the pool while Bob rested his bad knee....he is ready for that knee replacement!
After showers we sat down to work on the computer and we will all be going to bed soon because we are exhausted and have a long day of traveling ahead of us tomorrow.
Can't wait to see all of you.
Have a great night!!
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