One of the highlights of my first trip to Costa Rica was our tour of Manuel Antonio National Park. The abundant wildlife and beautiful beach made the park a great place to spend a half a day. I was excited for our kids to get to experience it too.
We had a private tour guide for our group of 16. Our travel agent arranged for a driver to pick us up at the hotel and we met our guide at the entrance to the national park.
The main trail in the park leads to the beach, and the first section of it is an elevated wooden boardwalk through the jungle. Unfortunately, a large section of it was closed for repairs so we walked on the gravel road that ran parallel to the trail. It definitely didn’t have the same luster as the jungle-y boardwalk and I was a little disappointed not to have a more authentic (and shady) experience.
Despite the less than idyllic path, our guide still found lots of wildlife. All of the guides really worked together and when one would spot something and set up his scope, others followed suit. For the majority of the trail, our wildlife spotting were limited to much smaller critters, like frogs, crabs, and insects. They were really neat to see but not the wildlife extravaganza I had been expecting.
After about an hour of interesting but not exciting wildlife spottings, we finally saw some monkeys. We first spotted some capuchin monkeys along a section of the boardwalk trail that was visible from the road, which made me feel like we really were missing out by not being on the trail. But as we walked further along the road, they started jumping in the trees above us and walking along the electrical wires.
At the end of the trail before heading to the beach, we also saw a sloth and a howler monkey up high in the trees. They weren’t really visible without our guide’s scope so we were fortunate to have him spot them, line up his scope for us, and even take pictures for us.
We parted ways with our guide and headed down to the beach to enjoy some relaxation time before walking back out of the park to meet our driver. It had gotten fairly overcast by this point and sprinkled a little bit on and off. But most of our crew got in the water for a quick dip. I didn’t want to deal with changing into a bathing suit and then being wet for our hike back so I just relaxed on the beach, taking pictures and protecting out bags from rogue iguanas. (Quick side note – two of us (including me) woke up the next morning with our legs completely covered with bites, which we think were from sand fleas on the beach here.)
We walked out of the park following a different trail that went along the beach and then through some mangroves. We were hoping to spot a caiman but didn’t have any luck. We did, however, spot more howler monkeys and some beautiful views!
While we thought our guide was great and had an overall enjoyable day, we were a little underwhelmed by our visit to Manuel Antonio Park. Not being able to take the main trail was disappointing and the wildlife spotting weren’t nearly as numerous or interesting as we had hoped for. I had read a lot of reviews that said if you stayed in Tulemar, you didn’t need to bother going to Manuel Antonio because you would see more wildlife in Tulemar. That turned out to be completely true. I think it was still a good experience for the kids to go there but it was probably their least favorite activity that we did in Costa Rica.
