Of Costa Rica, slow creatures on the trees and slower on the ground

We headed down to tickle out love for nature to the National Park of Manuel Antonio.

Being the cheap yet knowledge loving bastards that we are, we decided that to splash out on a full official guide (20-25$ each) was way too much, whilst going without would have been an insult to millions of years of darwinian evolution. So we managed to be convinced by some guy standing around in the square that he was an unofficial, yet very skilled guide.

Small little bats covering from the sunlight under a palm leaf. Notice the albino!

It should have been a hint the fact that he had a book with postcards of the animals and their names written in the writing of a 3-year-old.

Modern day dinosaurs

He told us that the only problem was that because he did not have a telescope, he would be unable to see the animals up close, but that we would see plenty anyway.

We arrived at the park and another hint was given by the fact that the guy let slip that his cousin was in fact an official guide, obviously the gene pool had favoured his relative. Moreover he was unaware of an increase in price that had occurred 2 weeks earlier, so he could hardly have been a very popular choice amongst the tourists scouring the land for an illuminator.

I know its just a grasshopper, but it was pretty huge

The park was awesome, but no thanks to the guide. He was completely and utterly useless. In fact he was so useless he was annoying and I tried to seperate myself from him as much as possible. The only thing he could recognise was the strangulator tree and that purely because it couldn't get up and walk away from him.

This was a recurrent scene:

He would walking in a straight line noticing nothing.

When he saw a group of people with a proper guide looking at something he'd run up to them and asking them with a soft voice

lame guide - "what are you looking at?"
tourist with proper guide - "a monkey!"

and he would turn to us with great voice and shout

lame guide - "over here guys, I ve found a monkey!"
us - "where?"
lame guide - "over there... somewhere..."

Anyway, whilst he was showing us a grasshopper, Maria and I turned around only to discover one of the rarest sights in the park, a 3 nailed sloth, already extremely rare , had made its once-in-a-week descent from its tree to take a dump and was moving slowly just 1 meter from us.


One of the rarest sights in my life

It was quite an exciting moment to be honest, it's the natural park's equivalent of winning the lottery!

Apart from that we saw Lizards, Iguanas, Frogs, Gold-web Spiders (much to the arachnophobic joy of Natxo), Sleeping Bats, Lobsters, and Badgers disrespecting Yankee tourists.


Scream Natxo, scream!!!

We packed up and eaded out to the final part of our jurney with Cata and Maria, and also one of the best few days in the trip: Puerto Viejo, Rocking J's, Rafting & Txarlie!