Manuel Antonio

One of my high school friends and I have been in Manuel Antonio for 5 days now. To be totally honest, it is kind of a pain in the butt here. Why? Well, the ¨town¨ is sort of like Cinque Terre, in the sense that it is a strip of buildings along a very steep series of hills. Except imagine instead of a walking path, there´s a busy street with cars, trucks, buses, and scooters zooming around hairpin turns. (No sidewalks, of course!) Any time you want to go somewhere, you´re either walking 10-15 minutes along this ridiculous road, or you´re waiting anywhere from 5 mins to half an hour for the next bus.

The weather is hot and humid, but the beach is really nice. A little more ¨Mexico¨ compared to Tamarindo. More people walking up and down trying to sell you drinks, food, jewelry, etc. (Everything is also more expensive here. Bottled water costs 850 versus 600 in Tam.) But the water is so warm it makes Tamarindo feel like an ice bath. Surfing is OK - I have only been once but we are planning on going again tomorrow. The waves break pretty shallow and it´s kind of rocky in places, so that´s not so awesome in my opinion. But there are some really good locals who are fun to watch. Have you ever gone fishing and started at your bobber for so long that at night when you close your eyes, you see it? When I close my eyes now I see surfers.

The national park, which is one of the main draws to Manuel Antonio, was beautiful. We saw baby monkeys, a sloth, and several other animals, but my favorite were these giant butterflies. We saw two of them - they were iridescent blue and their wing span was at least the size of my hand. (And I have man hands, so that´s pretty big!) They flew much slower than a normal butterfly, which made them look like cartoons. To put it in technical terms, it was way cool.

I would come back to this place (preferably with the fiance) for 2 reasons:

1. To eat at El Avion again. It´s a restaurant built around a C-123 plane. The plane thing is gimmicky, of course, but their food was amazing. I had a giant plate of mahi-mahi, complete with a sweet-spicy passion fruit sauce, grilled veggies, and rice, for about $13. Maybe I am biased because this is the only upscale restaurant I´ve eaten at on this whole trip, but I am still drooling when I think about it.

2. To watch the sunsets at Vista Serena. Vista Serena is the 3rd and final hostel that we have stayed at on this trip. So many people recommended it to me that I was afraid it couldn´t possibly live up to the hype. But it is indeed as cool as they say, and the balcony (complete with several hammocks) has a priceless view of the ocean. At about 5:30 every day the sun sets, and it gets so red. You can look right at it and see the little puddle of red below it as it melts into the ocean.