Like any good trip, the final portion of our vacation involved lazing around the pool and beach doing jack squat (for the most part).
The drive down from Monteverde to the coaast was long, but beautiful.
I believe this is the first appearance of the "road dog" in my photos, but they were everywhere. Sometimes standing in the road,
sometimes lying in the road taking a nap, always in the way and always cute.
En route to Manuel Antonio, we passed over the Tarcoles river where you can walk out on the bridge, look down, and see a LOT
of crocodiles. Big bastards too. I guess folks used to throw chickens over the bridge and get them worked into a frenzy, but
thankfully that isn't allowed anymore.
Once we got to the beach, we ate lunch and Chelsea devoured a whole plate of nachos.
Our room at the Falls Resort - this place was super nice...flat screen TV, huge soft bed, big room, nice stone and wood work.
The staff was fantastic, especially the bartender Charlie. Highly recommended.
The jungle view from our patio.
A Basilisk in the tree, if you look closely. These lizards are also known as "Jesus Lizards" because they can walk on water.
I did a whole lot of this while in Manuel Antonio.
A beetle that was in our room. As we were basically sleeping in the jungle, bugs were everywhere, and most of them were
pretty cool looking.
Just across the street from our hotel was a restaurant and bar built into a retired cargo plane that was formerly involved in the
Iran Contra Affair! You can read all about it here, pretty dang interesting.
Chelsea celebrates Ollie North's undoing with a fruity drink.
Gecko! these things are evertywhere at night - not as colorful as the ones we saw in Hawai'i or Cambodia, but cool nonetheless.
This crap picture represents the greatest moment of the entire trip for me - I saw a sloth!!! Look closely and you can kinda make
him out.
Because that photo is so bad, here are some other photos of sloths.
Just after we saw the sloth, a mama and baby deer came out of the woods and milled around. They pretty much looked just
like the deer we have here, only they spoke Spanish (obviously).
Manuel Antonio beach within the Manuel Antonio National Park. It was beautiful and the water was perfect.
We did a lot of this at the beach.
And hanging way above us, the bees did some giant nest building. They didn't seem too interested in us though.
At one end of the beach there was an assload of white faced capuchin monkeys doing their thing...aka "monkeyin' around".
They weren't bashful of people at all.
Yes, they were eating bananas. How cliche can you get?!? C'mon monkeys, let's try a little harder than that.
We took a long ,sweaty walk around the peninsula that dangles down from the park like an old man's ball sack.
There were nice cliff views all along the walk.
Some random kid took this shadowy photo of us; as I was drenched in sweat, the less you see of me the better.
During our walk we also saw a family of agouti, which are a rabbit-sized tailless rodent. Pretty damn cute actually.
We spent part of one day riding four wheelers through the countryside. It was fun and beautiful...the only downside being we
were with a family of the slowest drivers known to man. Like Ricky Bobby, I wanted to go fast!
We spent a lot of our time riding around in this river bed.
This is the river that I almost dumped Chelsea into, trying to go over a big rock. Next time she'll lean forward instead of
backwards.
I saw a duck!
Pretty typical countryside living.
I've often referred to Chelsea as a space cadet, but this puts it over the top.
After the ride we went back to their headquarters/clubhouse for breakfast, where they had a dangerous guard dog...
...and there he is. Just plain vicious.
He was a sweet little rottie, I petted him for a while and then he followed me around. The only thing vicious about this dog was
that crazy claw on his paw.
Plantains. They love plantains in Costa Rica.
We were leaving our hotel on our last day and noticed this toad just chillin' on the balcony. He was alive, just lazy.
On our drive back to San Jose, we stopped off at one of the smaller beaches known as Esterillos Oeste.
And when I say "smaller" I mean population and popularity-wise, certainly not size-wise.
And that was the end of our Costa Rica trip. Ol' fishhead says "adios"!