The road to Manuel Antonio involved riding through forests of African Palm Oil trees that had been planted some years ago to satisfy global demand. Clearly large tracts of original forest had to be removed to create these plantations which will have severely affected biodiversity. There were some 'information' panels about Palm Oil along the side of the road - seemingly sponsored by the Palm Oil companies...
It is extremely hot and sticky here on the Pacific just like it was on the Caribbean side. Françoise was determined to go to a beach with a bit of an adventure tied to it. It involved a bus ride, a 45 mins trek followed by a descent to the beach with ropes tied to trees to help you. Probably because of the effort required to get there it was described as 'secluded' and 'not crowded' and probably because of these two descriptors, it was also highlighted as a nudist beach. With our swimming costumes packed we were obviously prepared for both outcomes.
It was Easter weekend. In Colombia and Ecuador, and possibly elsewhere too, this would have been massive but here, in Costa Rica, it doesn't seem to be a big thing. There will have been churches and cathedrals in towns and cities we have not seen where celebrations will have been taking place. But there has been absolutely nothing where we have been.
Camouflage is big, and obviously very important, for the majority of fauna that we see. Some, like the Toucans, say 'stuff you' to camouflage and just dress up in scary colours. But toucans have big powerful bills. The walk to the 'secluded' beach involved a lot of scurrying sounds. The scurrying sounds emanated from smallish land crabs (10cms including their legs) - even though we were about 80m about sea level. The camouflage involved a black shell with two large yellow blobs behind the eyes, orange legs and purple claws. Not sure what they were trying to blend in with? As far as we were concerned we could camouflage ourselves on the beach with our swimming costumes as there wasn't a nudist in sight - not that we were looking of course.
We had a guide for Manuel Antonio National Park. It was probably the best thing to do. They do have eyes for everything. Especially those things using camouflage. We saw quite a few things that otherwise we probably would have missed including another brightly coloured toucan. So far we have seen three types of toucans: the keel billed with its multi coloured beak, the fiery billed aracari and now the yellow- throated toucan.
The white faced capuchin monkeys were not shy and neither was the iguana who walked around Françoise while she was sunning herself on the beach. The monkeys look sweet but they are omnivorous and eat baby howler monkeys. The National Park has two beaches and, of course, they are only available to those who are in the National Park and have paid their entrance fees. We were staying a short local bus ride from the park and we thought the sign adjacent to the bakery quite illuminating. It wasn't that the passion fruit cheesecake tasted bad, or was cheap for that matter, but feeding it to the crocs?
Whilst in Quito Ecuador, we met Tim and Doug from the States during a trip to Cotopaxi Volcano. Tim used to live in San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica. He has friends still living there and kindly introduced us to them. Kate and Eric were keen to invite us into their spectacular home. We had an absolutely lovely time chatting with them and visiting their local pub. Costa Rica has a lot of plus points and there are plenty of obvious reasons why people would come to live here and quite a few less obvious ones that Kate and Eric highlighted to us. The cost of living is tough here, things are expensive, but we suppose that also helps in limiting the number of people who come here in a way. And that then helps limit the problem. Apart from their wonderful hospitality and beautiful home with views, we will probably remember the cicada morning and evening chorus the most.
Kate and Eric's house was a house as we would recognise it except a tad larger. This is not the case of either the majority of accommodation we stay in or the houses people live in here. Corrugated metal sheeting abounds. It has been like that since Argentina. Eric told us that he replaced some on part of their roof as there were multiple overlapping short lengths which represented a leakage risk. But the sheets he removed were then reused on another property. Not a singular occurrence.
Whilst we were in San Jose we also played the game of hunt the FedEx parcel. It was a very frustrating game that took 9 hours of our time over two days with six trips to various FedEx offices, so the less said about it the better.
Having met up last night with Brigitte and Joerg, a German couple on BMW bikes, in La Fortuna we have now moved on to the (very) small border town of Los Chiles which we hope will give us an easy crossing into Nicaragua. We can still remember Nicaragua being on the news with respect to Sandanista guerrillas but don't really remember anything about it - so there is a bit of trepidation hanging about us. We have enjoyed lots of aspects of Costa Rica. Roll on tomorrow...
