June 6th, 2010
Off to the Beach
After a spending a day in the clouds we decided to take it easy for the evening. Our hotel had such a beautiful view we decided to start happy hour a little early and watch the sunset. 
After a few drinks we decided to head to a restaurant outside the hotel that I had read about in the guide. Monteverde is a tiny town so pretty much all the restaurants are in the guide. Sofia’s was Fodor’s choice. The food was nuevo latin style and was really good! Plus there was tres leches cake for dessert so I was in heaven.
The next morning we were being picked up at 8:30 to head to our next destination…the beach! After a stop to switch vans in Jaco, which was a sort of trashy looking beach town, we made it to our hotel, La Mariposa, around 12:30. It was a beautiful hotel with an even more beautiful pool and view.
Here is the view from our room.
The first day we went down to the town beach and had lunch and walked around. There were a lot of locals bugging us to buy crap, rent chairs, drink here etc. It was kind of annoying. We pretty quickly went back to the hotel and went to the pool. The pool was awesome.
Here I am, walking in…
Swimming in…
Swimming around…
and the view from the pool was beautiful
Overall, it was an amazing pool. Our friends had recommended this hotel to us, I think mostly based on the coolness of the pool. And boy, were they right.
After watching the sunset by the pool we had dinner at the hotel and called it a night. The heat was sort of exhausting there so we were kind of boring.
The next morning we had breakfast on the patio overlooking the ocean and planned our day. Manuel Antonio National Park was right down the road so we took the hotel shuttle to the park. Once again we had tons of people bothering us to be our guide, sell us water (not a bad idea) and other crap. We decided to skip the guide this time because we were a little guided out. That turned out to be a fine choice because there were so many guides along the trail that we could just look where they were looking to see the animals. Also, the park is full of animals so you didn’t need to look very hard to see anything.
The first animal we saw was a sloth chilling in a tree.
Then a crazy rodent crossed our path which looked a little like a miniature ROUS.
More sloths
Isn’t he cute???!?!
Coming soon…our trip to the beach and the last day of vacation. Stay tuned.