Manuel Antonio National Park was listed as the best place to see sloths in the wild. It was also supposed to have a beautiful beach so I really wanted to go. We drove past the turnoff on our way south but the park was randomly closed on Tuesdays so we couldn't stop that day. So we had to drive another hour back up to it.
Up until this last day, we had nothing but good experiences with all the places we had been. I had looked online and saw that this park doesn't fill up (with Covid they started limiting the number of people they would let in each day, but the reviews said we wouldn't have a problem in May in the afternoon). So we were driving up this narrow road with tons of cars and people all over and following the map to get to our destination. The map said we still had further to go but there were signs for parking for the Park and there were men waving people down on the road. I was hesitant, but I wasn't sure about parking so I thought maybe this is where we needed to park. A couple pushy men started asking us stuff about if we had already purchased our passes and when we said no they led us over to the table to buy them. Then they were selling us on the guides, saying a group was leaving in 30 minutes or we could pay for a private guide, etc. We were both getting rubbed the wrong way by this main guy. He told us the cost would something like $31 per person, but then he said it in colones. The exchange rate is close to 600 colones to $1 so it's hard to do the calculations and it sounds like a crazy amount but it's not usually. After they ran the credit card and gave us the receipt and introduced us to the guide, Ryan looked at the receipt and googled the cost and it was like $250. My heart just sank. That was a ridiculous amount of money for a park that should only cost $18, plus a little for parking and maybe $50 for the guide. Their price was ridiculous. So Ryan went back and started saying they lied to us and the guy got all defensive and called Ryan all sorts of names but he was not the one in charge. The guy in charge said it was fine and he would give us a refund. In the meantime the guide was trying to be a nice guy and tell us he has nothing to do with these guys, they just hire him to do tours and he was going to head home but he would be happy to do a tour for us still if we wanted to hire him privately, etc. We probably could've paid to park there but Ryan did not trust that guy at all and wasn't going to leave his car there, thinking it would probably end up with slashed tires. Oh, they were also trying to tell us that there were no more tickets available since we didn't buy in advance and they were our only option. This was a big lie. We drove up the road a bit more and there was a lady at a parking lot with plenty of parking who charged us $6 to park there, it was a short walk to the park and they charged us $18 per person for entrance fee. The guide told us they wouldn't allow us to bring food in so he hid my food in his pockets while we went in and they looked through my bag. By this time we only had a couple hours before the park closed and the sun started to set. I wanted to see a sloth or a toucan, but I didn't want to look at every lizard and bird out there. The whole thing just left a bad feeling in my mouth and all I wanted to do was lay on a beautiful hot beach with a book for a little while. We did see sloths and that was great. He showed us some lizards, a chameleon which is fun, and a deer. I think there were monkeys but we didn't care enough to go find them. We made it to the beach and it was beautiful!
There's a sloth in this picture, but I'm posting it so you can see how hard they are to spot. We never would've seen them without the guide. And we wouldn't have seen much of it without his telescope. The next pic is this one but zoomed in.
We saw three different ones, one with a baby. That made me happy. The last one was moving around, not just sleeping.
There were a few different bays like this that we passed and they were beautiful. BUT the sun was low in the sky even though it was like 2:30. And the tide was high so i couldn't really lay on my towel and read because the water was fast approaching.
The biggest reason I couldn't really relax though, was that our guide was trying to sell us on this monkey boat ride. This is something the slimy sales guy had shown us pictures of as an option if we wanted to do this tour as well. So I was skeptical. But our guide said he knows the guys that do it and he could get us a good price. Ryan really wanted to do it. And I thought playing with monkeys sounded really fun too, but I was just really, really exhausted and my guard was up with these scammers. Ryan said he didn't have cash and our guide was saying they couldn't take credit card, something about the deal he was trying to get us. He kept saying we could go to a bank or an ATM and Ryan was like, we don't have a debit card. It's only a credit card. I am still unsure why this guide was so insistent that we do this boat ride. I'm not sure what he got out of it. I'm sure they give him a kickback for referrals but the amount of effort he put in compared to the amount of money we paid, it's hard to imagine he got too much.
Somehow the credit card ended up being okay (I think we had to pay a little more or something) so the guide rushed us out of the park, jumped in our car so we could drive him down the hill to where he was parked, and we followed him to the river. When he got out of our car, he left his huge telescope in the back. Like, as a way of making sure we didn't decide to bail? He trusted us with it? The drive was further out of the way than I had anticipated and the whole time we were wondering if he was leading us somewhere and he and his cronies were going to rob us. This whole day made me anxious!
But nothing bad happened. We got on a boat, even though it was getting late and it didn't seem like they really wanted to go out again. I was a bit worried about bugs on the water, and I did get eaten a little but it wasn't unbearable. We saw some bats, iguanas, a fur-de-lance snake in a hole in the riverbed wall (that we got closer to than I wanted to) and we found some monkeys. The first group of monkeys we found were super skittish and we waited there for like 20 minutes trying to lure them onto our boat. We think they must've been full from all the other boat rides during the day. It was fun seeing so many monkeys jumping around in the trees, but I was ready to give up. But we found another tree with a few more monkeys and finally one was brave enough to come play with us. The guide told us he snuck on a couple bananas but asked us not to tell anyone or he would get in trouble. He acted like his boss would get mad. Though I'm sure this is what they do every time, but I guess they have to act like they don't allow it and the guide would take the fall if they got in trouble.
It was a pretty ride. And we had fun with the monkeys.
Can you see the black diamond shapes on the snake?
And we finally made the hour long drive back to our hotel, but we stopped for pizza at another tiny town on the way. There is nothing fast about the food here. Every place we went took a long time to make our food. But it was all small business, and the one preparing the food seemed to be the owners. With a little patience, we got some good food. We took the pizza to go and enjoyed it in our hotel.
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