Two faces of Quepos and Manuel Antonio

We woke up early and ate breakfast at the almost 100% glutenfree mono congo café in dominical. We went to see the Nauyaca waterfalls in the morning and then drove to Quepos, our next stop. In Quepos we checked- in at the Villas Jacquelina Hotel, nice but a bit far from the city center, and walked around the area. First, as we walked along the main road, we got to a very luxurious tourist place which looked a bit like a gated community. The buildings were all perfectly white and built around a plaza with view over the sea. There were many fancy seafood restaurants and super expensive souvenir shops. The place was called marina pez-vela, and is a harbour for sporthfishing. We soon figured out that this was the place rich old men went on hilodays. I didnt like it at all, i felt more and more uncomfortable every second we spent there. When we left I realized even more what hige contrast there is between this marina and the rest of poor quepos. We wanted to walk on the beach but it was separeted by a river we had to cross. It was way deeped than we expected, so unfortunately I got wet almost up to my tummy. The beach was beautiful but I couldnt really enjoy it because I was still discussing with Noah about this gated community we‘ve seen. His point of view was that it was good on one hand because it provided jobs for the people living in quepos. I agreed to a certain point but still thought that the money could‘ve been used for the local economy and to renovate parts of the city. We didnt walk back on the beach because we wanted to see another part of the city. What we didnt know was that, this oart wasn‘t a real city.. it was a slum. A dirty road covered with holes and with dogs walking on it, dying of starvation , many huts, most of them very small with people sitting in front of them, all looking sad and lifeless, and a very bad smell. Noah and I went completely quiet. I was speechless, I didnt even know what to think. As we passed the people and the houses, I felt so so bad. When we got to the end of the road we had to take a ferry taxi that brought us to the other side. We walked back to the hotel but almost didnt talk. Eventually we started talking about what we‘ve seen and how injust everything is. It couldnt get out of my head during thw whole evening. We cooked veggie pasta together and Noah ate a lot, as usual. I dont know how a person can eat this quantity of food. The next morning we woke up at 6 and went to Manuel Antonio National Park. When we were at about 1 kilometre before the park entrance my google maps suggested, people who looked like park rangers told us to leave the highway and park in some parking lot at the side of a street. We told them we wanted to go to Manuel Antonio and they said rhis was the parking. I almost couldnt believe them because there were no other cars there, but they looked really professional. We got out of the car but my intuition told me that something was wrong. I told Noah to get back into the car and we ignored those people shouting and telling us to turn around and followed my google maps, which in the end brought us to the real park parking lot. We parked and were thankful that we hadnt been tricked.

My biggest goal for the day was to find a sloth, because I had never seen one plus I thought and still consider them super cute. We walked around the park anf did every possible trail. We saw iguanas, monkeys, of which one had a very special relationship with Noah, some type of pigs and in the end even two sloths. There were many tourists at some beaches but on the trails we were basically alone. After seeing everything we decided to leave and drove our car to Jacó.Read more