Manuel Antonio National Park

Manuel Antonio was the second beach that we got to visit on our trip. This excursion was planned through our program so everyone on the trip went together and stayed in two hotels that were next to each other. My group actually lucked out and got the nicer hotel which was called Hotel Playa Espadilla. We had nice rooms, a pool, and a buffet breakfast every morning. We left San Jose on Friday morning (no classes that day!) and arrived to our hotel mid afternoon. In Manuel Antonio there is a public beach and then also the main national park which you have to pay to get into. If you ever go there,i suggest you spend the few dollars it costs to get in because it is well worth it! The beaches are incredible (shown on the left) and there are tons of different hikes you can take which lead you to smaller more secluded beaches and also to different lookouts which are breathtaking! The main beach that the entrance to the park leads you to is the picture shown on the left. This sand is very similar to the sand we are used to seeing. A bunch of my friends and I ventured off to see what other beaches we could find and we came across one that was mostly stones. This beach was significantly smaller than the one above and only had three or four other people on it when we got there. It was mostly small pebbles but as we walked out into the water the stones got bigger and bigger and they were also kind of sharp so we were afraid to go in too far. On our adventures finding these different beaches and lookouts we were greeted by many monkeys. We mostly saw white faced capuchin monkeys which are shown on the right. This picture shows a baby monkey (mono as they are called in Spanish) on his mothers back. This picture was taken without a zoom so you can see how they are not afriad of getting close to people. Sometimes we would get frightened by them if we hadn't seen one and it just popped out of no where. It was very interesting to watch them up close in their own habitat to see how they interacted and what they would eat. In addition to these monkeys, we also heard many howler monkeys at night. The first night we were in our hotel we heard these very loud howling noises but had no idea what they were until the next day when we were told at breakfast what they were. I would never imagine that monkeys could make such loud noises but those were actually the sounds we fell asleep to at night.
Another animal that we saw while on our hike was a sloth. Sloths grow to about the size of a medium-sized dog and have a small head and flat face with a snub nose and beady eyes. This is the picture I took of the one I saw just hanging in a tree pretty high up. Sloths are much easier to capture in pictures compared to monkeys because monkeys are constantly moving. Sloths on the other hand can barely cover a mile in four hours. They spend up to 18 hours daily sleeping curled up with their feet drawn close together and their heads tucked between their forelimbs. This is definitely an animal I will not forget seeing on my trip because it was so out of the ordinary for me. Costa Rica actually has two types of sloths but we only got to see the three toed sloth.
Another very exciting part of this trip to Manuel Antonio was the canopy tour that I went on where I got to go ziplining, but that story is for next week!