Manuel Antonio

This past week one of my homework assignments was to keep a journal in Spanish every day for one week. This consisted of a lot of writing and thus, I haven’t wanted to do any more writing for my blog! I handed in my journal today, which means I’m now free to write for fun!! So here is a long over-due entry about Manuel Antonio, the beach that we went to this past weekend.

The first night started off with a little bit of an adventure… We arrived on Friday around 4:30. Our hotel was right on the beach! So of course the first thing that we did, was to check it out. It was incredible, as you can see from the pictures. Moriah and I decided to go for a nice walk along the shore and to explore the town while we waited for dinner. We walked as far as we could go and enjoyed the beauty of the water, the sand, the forest along the shore and the rock formations. Then we walked through the town and looked in some of the tourist shops. About forty minutes later we could tell that the sun was getting ready to set, so we headed back to the hotel. We walked along the shore, looking for the hotel, but we couldn’t find it. About ten minutes later, the sun was completely set and everything was dark. As we continued to walk, the lights from the town and the hotels along the shore began to diminish. There was no one on the beach, and we were starting to get a little worried. We continued to walk, but still found nothing that looked familiar. Along the shoreline was a tropical forest and anyone could easily hide him or herself along the brush in the dark and pop out at us. After almost walking along the entire shore, we decided that it wasn’t safe and that we should go up to the road and try to find the hotel that way. We were getting more and more scared. We hadn’t even been there for a few hours and already we were lost. We didn’t know the name of the hotel, any numbers to call, and we were without a male – two American girls lost in a beach town at night is not a good combo! I started to pray out loud: Lord, please keep us safe and lead us to the hotel! We couldn’t ask anyone for direction, because then they would know that we were lost and could easily take advantage of us. We tried our best to pretend like we weren’t lost. It took us awhile to find the street, but we felt a lot better once we did! There were more light and more people. We passed a lot of sketchy, creepy men, but thankfully we didn’t have any problems. We remembered that our program director had told us that the hotel was next to a gay bar, and we remembered what the bar looked like, so this became our landmark. Manuel Antonio was very populated by homosexuals, so at least if we were going to get attacked it would be by a woman ; ) FINALLY we found the gay bar and our hotel! What a relief! However, our relief didn’t last too long as we quickly realized that the gate was locked and we had no way of getting in. We called out for someone to come help us, but no one came. We talked through our options and decided that the only solution was to climb the fence. So that’s what we did! Moriah and I helped each other get up and over the fence and finally we were safe and sound inside the hotel! At dinner we recounted this story to our program director and she told us that about twenty feet away from the gate was another gate into the hotel that was unlocked.......... will I ever outgrow my blond moments???

Saturday was spent on the beach, soaking up the sun! I faithfully applied and reapplied sun block and successfully avoided sunburn! The only thing that I burnt were my eyelids… I never thought to put any there! Sunday morning we woke-up early and went to the Monte Verde national park. It was like an animal and nature reserve that you had to pay to enter. Inside was a jungle that we hiked through and eventually found an incredible beach! We were really excited to discover a monkey playing on a tree at the beach. At first we thought he was really cute, but after a little while we discovered that his “cuteness” was just a cover-up for his expert robbing skills! He was determined that we had bananas in our bags and he was not going to give-up easy. He carefully watched us and the minute that we looked away, he leaped from the tree onto our bags and started throwing everything out that wasn’t food! On his first attempt, I saw him before he was able to take the bag up to his tree and ran over to get him out of our stuff. Defeated, he ran back to his tree, but he was visibly angry! His angry face and his attempts to poop on us evidenced this! A little while later a woman walked by the tree with a backpack on and he leaped onto her back and tried to open it up! He provided quite the entertainment!

We saw many other animals in the park such as a hanging sloth, huge rodent looking animals, ginormous lizards, and beach raccoons. I was sad when we had to leave and wished I could have spent more time there! Around noon we packed-up our bags and headed back to San Jose. This trip marked the end of our group excursions… meaning that from now on I’ll have to do my own planning and pay for any traveling ☹ But I’m thankful for the incredible trips that we have had!





I would write more about what has been going on this week, but sadly I have to go finish studying for a huge grammar test tomorrow (ewe yuck! I hate grammar!). I'm posting lots of pictures in this entry since I can't post them on facebook! More to come soon! Tengan buenas suenas!