I've never been to Hawaii...

...but I'm already convinced that Manuel Antonio is one of the best places in the world to spend a vacation. This is where I spent last weekend with my friend, Jess. After suffering through the four hour bus ride (and four hours of extreme motion sickness), we finally arrived in Jurassic Park Paradise Friday evening. The beaches were absolutely gorgeous, not crowded and a good place for spotting animals.


We saw a lot of these osos perezosos (sloths) hanging out all over the park. It was hard to notice them at first because they move so slowly.


The beach had lots of these cute little hermit crabs scuttling around.


And of course, no trip to Manuel Antonio would be complete without monkeys! We saw three different kinds in the park, but these white-faced monkeys were my favorites. See the grouchy look on the other monkey's face? He wants some coconut too.


We spent all day Saturday and all Sunday morning hiking around the park and lying on the beaches.


I thought I'd leave a message in the sand for all my poor landlocked buddies in Salt Lake.



While we didn't see any monkeys really close to the beach, we did see some really sneaky raccoons running off with a little boy's peanut butter sandwich.


Jess was really trying to watch out for the little girls with abnormally long arms, dogs, sloths and monkeys in the road.


And for those of you who were wondering what a $10 a night hotel looks like, this is it. Even though it wasn't particularly fancy, it was less than a block away from the park entrance.


Our room was so small that I couldn't get a good picture of the entire room, but here is Jess looking particularly gigantic in front of the itty bitty bathroom door. We had to duck to walk through the door. Our fancy digs included an icy cold shower, teeny ants on the floor and two geckos that liked to chirp in the middle of the night.


My favorite part of staying at this hotel was the yummy breakfast we had every morning. This is gallo pinto, cheese and bread served on a banana leaf which gives the food a very interesting flavor. We also had fresh guanavana juice each morning from the guanavana tree in the yard. The family who owned the hotel was so sweet and took great care of us.


I love throwing these random ocean pictures in here because they are so pretty. Enjoy!


Because Manuel Antonio looked just like where they filmed Jurassic Park (which I'm told actually was filmed in Costa Rica), I thought I'd post some pictures of the "dinosaurs" we saw. There were lots,

and lots,
and lots of lizards!

It was a pretty fantastic weekend, and I would highly recommend Manuel Antonio as a great vacation spot. I wanted to stay there forever, but I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't pass my Refugee Law class by lying on the beach all week. Too bad.