In September of 2015, Volaris, Mexico’s second-largest Airline, added San José, Costa Rica to its list of destinations you can reach nonstop from Guadalajara.
You can fly to that Central American jungle paradise for about 265 dollars (round trip), not much more than the price of a ticket to San Antonio Texas, as long as you book about five months in advance. On top of that, your flight will take only three and a half hours, less than a drive to Manzanillo.
So I decided to fly to Costa Rica to check out Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio, which I had heard deserves to be listed among “the twelve most beautiful parks in the world.”
In San José — for 63 dollars a day — we rented a brand-new Korando, a Korean-made car which I can’t exactly recommend, considering what happened to us 30 kilometers west of San José. Here we decided to turn on the air conditioning. Well, we tried! A check of the Korando manual proved I was doing everything right, but all we got was hot air... not quite what you want when heading for a tropical jungle famous for high temperatures and humidity. We stopped next to a toll booth on the expressway and called the rental agency. “We’ll bring you a new car in one hour,” they said. A few minutes later, a motorcycle policeman pulled up to us. “Sorry, you have to get off this road right now. It’s going to close.”
“What? Isn’t this the most important highway in the whole country?”
“Sí, señor, and it is about to be turned into a one-way street, pointing, unfortunately for you, in the opposite direction you want to go. At 1 p.m. this road will only accept traffic headed for San José.”
Can you imagine the autopista to Puerto Vallarta suddenly being transformed into a one-way road to Guadalajara? Apparently this bizarre maneuver is put into action in Costa Rica on big holiday weekends for the benefit of citizens of the capital who would like to get home fast. The only trouble was that no one — neither our hotel nor the car-rental agency — had bothered to mention this minor inconvenience to us, nor had anyone informed Google Maps, which, for all the rest of the day, kept trying to redirect us back to the now inaccessible toll road.
Eventually, our replacement Korando reached us at a gas station in the little town of Atenas. Now our problem was how to reach the coast via country roads not on our map. As we puzzled over this, a Chinese gentleman who had been forced off the highway just like us, approached. “I don’t speak Spanish” he said. “Can you tell me what in the world is going on?”
The Chinaman looked simply stunned when he discovered the superhighway had become a one-way street going the wrong way. “Don’t worry,” we told him, “we are going to use Mexnet, the traditional Mexican system of navigation: leaning out the window and asking directions every five minutes. Just follow us!”
Well, Mexnet eventually did get us — and the Chinese family — all the way to Quepos, the last town before Manuel Antonio Park, but, of course, it took us all day instead of the three hours we had expected, and we arrived in the dark.
We stayed at a rustic and colorful hotel called Las Tres Banderas, surrounded by lush vegetation. From our balcony, the next morning, we spotted a pair of scarlet macaws, collages of red, yellow and blue, billing and cooing on a tree branch just above us, a rare sight, since the pet trade and habitat loss have greatly reduced their population. When we went for breakfast, the cook had to spend more time shooing away white-faced capuchin monkeys than frying eggs. Seeing animals like these in their natural habitat was what had brought us to this corner of Costa Rica and we were not disappointed.
After breakfast, we headed for the park. As we approached, numerous locals flagged us down. “Bienvenidos, park right here!”
Gracias, but where is the entrance to the Park?”
“Right here, señor, this is the Park parking lot.”
“What? It looks practically empty.”
“No, no, up ahead you will find no parking of any kind.”
Ha ha, we were told this a dozen times and if you believe them, the only thing you’ll gain is an extra-long walk to the real park entrance (N9 23.494 W84 08.763). We were also told that a guide would cost ten dollars per person, in addition to the cost of a ticket to the park which is sixteen dollars for a foreigner and three for a Costa Rican. After haggling, we got a 50% discount on our guide, a knowledgeable young man named Eduardo, who, like all the guides at this park, totes a powerful telescope on a tripod so we nearly blind city-slickers are guaranteed a really good look at that black-footed ant shrike or helmet-headed lizard that the guide insists is “right there on that branch,” his finger pointing in the general direction of a thicket filled with thousands of branches.
The telescopes are particularly good for viewing slow-moving creatures like Bradipus variegatus, the three-toed brown-throated sloth, which abounds in this area. This curious creature is called a perezoso in Spanish, which means “lazy bones.”
“But they’re not lazy at all,” said Eduardo, “They just have a slow metabolism because they eat low-energy food. For example, when they defecate (every eight days) they climb all the way down to the ground to do it. They dig a big hole among the roots of the very same tree in which they live, do their business and then cover it up. I doubt if most humans would go to all that trouble.”
The trail eventually turned into a raised boardwalk which winds its way above a mangrove swamp. This route is particularly good for spotting sloths. Here you can also get up close and personal to the nastiest-looking palm tree in the world. It’s called Bactris major, the prickly palm, and produces a sweet, juicy fruit much beloved by monkeys. To keep them at bay, the tree bristles with thousands of long, black needles similar to those of a sea urchin. “It doesn’t work,” said guide Edu. “The fruit is so delicious, the monkeys are actually willing to bear the pain of climbing that nightmarish trunk just to get them.”
The total length of the trail (one way) is 1.4 kilometers from the park entrance to a breathtaking white-sand beach which has the fame of being the very best beach in Central America. “All of this jungle and coast was once owned by the United Fruit Company,” our guide told us. “They refused to allow local people to set foot on this land and sold it off to developers who wanted to turn the whole coast into resorts. Local resentment grew and grew until 1972 when the government appropriated and/or bought the property and declared the whole area a public park.”
By the way, Manuel Antonio is closed on Mondays and open other days only from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. Make sure you don’t arrive just as they are about to close!
On our way back to San José, we stopped at Carara National Park, which was inexpensive with easy-to-follow, self-explanatory trails where we wandered through a forest of curious cafecilla trees which apparently grow nowhere else in the world and about which little indeed is known. Here we spotted a pair of toucans hopping around on a branch of what in Mexico is called a parota tree but here is called a Guanacaste, Costa Rica’s national tree (Elephant-Ear in English).
Fortunately, we experienced no sudden road closures and direction reversals on the way back. How much longer it will be as cheap to fly to Costa Rica as Texas, I can’t say. Take advantage while you can!