I was told that that Manuel Antonio is close to nature, for me this meant close to spiders and freaky animals hahaha. But I have never been so much one with nature as in Manuel Antonio. Some ants crawling between the keys of my laptop as I am writing this right now. For a guy like me this sounds impossible, but it is happening.

Yesterday I walked for like two hours to a remote beach called Byzantine with hardly any people on it. Underway witnessed monkeys fighting birds, making a growling noise. They are called howler monkeys. When I came back to the Hostel I experienced a beautiful sunset on the same place where I had me breakfast the day before.

Today (because I catched that walking virus) I went for a hike in Manuel Antonio National Park. On my way there I met this great guy who makes wooden eyewear. He just started it out of boredom and now four years later has this great company going. Inspirational! I ended up hiking in the Manual Antonio National Park for 4 hours. I went up hill to Mirador to have a great view of the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. After that I went down hill. After a hiking through the bush bush you suddenly enter the Gemelas beach. And this transition is sooo overwhelming!

After that I was exhausted. You can’t buy any food in the park and I didn’t bring any food with me. But I WAS going to see everything! So I went on hiking for one more hour. On this last hiking trip I came across this old mexican lady who seemed a bit troubled. She seemed to be lost and was looking for her family. I tried to help her, but she nearly only spoke Spanish and mine is really bad. I found out she had to go to M.A. beach. I knew where it was. With hand signals and the map I tried to explain here and then decided to walk her there. She followed me, but was somehow realizing that she was really lost. She was afraid her family already left, she will never find them etc. etc. and suddenly she got this little panic attack. And I was thinking: “Why me!?” I could have just pointed her in the right direction and go on. But now we had some sort of agreement. So I kept calm and walked her to the beach. When we came there she anxiously scanned the beach for her family, but they weren’t there. She started crying. But thankgod suddenly someone waved at us from far. It was her daughter. She turned at me and thanked me like a hundred times. Karma will be good for this trip I guess! ;)

One thing I learned during this trip is that talking to 3 or more people gives you more valuable information than surfing the internet for a day. I now know that Costa Rica has a Pacific side and a Caribbean side. On the Pacific side most of the surfing is done. On the Caribbean side most of the relaxing is done. And where all the good spots are! All the people I met talked about Manuel Antonio. It is known for it’s great nature. So after the wild water rafting I took a bus to Manuel Antonio. One footnote: I slept 4 hours the day before and it was a three hour night trip. I took a taxi to the bus terminal. And I must say, it doesn’t feel very ok with all your belongings on you, close to midnight @ a bus terminal with no tourists and a few local grumpy, only spanish speaking people. I put on my poker face! ;) There I sat in the bus, my backpack in the storage beneath the bus and the daypack on my lap driving, somewhere in the world, to god knows where, sleepy as hell! These moments make you feel really futile. Luckily I use oMaps. I will talk about that later, but I arrived in Manuel Antonio and took the taxi to the Hostel Vista Serena. Only the next morning I understood the name of the Hostel as I was having breakfast. The view will make every breakfast taste like heaven!

Then my dentist from the Netherlands called me why I missed my appointment. I had a very good reason. He agreed ;)