Costa Rica Part 2

I’m back in the land of the living again, well kind of! I’ve had the flu for the past 8 days and it’s been reaaaaaal ugly. My fiancé took such good care of me while I was sick, but now he is sick and I feel awful about that. We are just practicing all that “in sickness and in health” stuff early. 🙂 Ok, I think we have it down.

For anyone on the cleanse, your 3 weeks is just about up if it’s not over yet! Congratulations for giving it a try!

Ok, here is the rest of our Costa Rica adventure.

On Christmas Eve we decided we needed to find a new place to stay for the rest of our trip. Someplace with air conditioning. Anyplace. We were staying in Jaco/Playa Hermosa by the way. Every hotel even remotely close was booked. So we kept expanding our search. Finally, we found a brand new Hilton (with a/c) with vacancy in Liberia. I know, funny name, right? We weren’t planning on going to Liberia on our our trip, but it turned out to be a great change of plans. Liberia is really close to great beaches, national parks and I’m convinced in 15 years it will be the Vegas of Costa Rica.
We get to Liberia and the climate there is totally different than the Puntarenas Region where we had been. Puntarenas was really green and humid. Liberia was more arid desert.
The following day we drove down the Nicoya Peninsula and went to a National Park and visited a town called Tamarindo. The National Park was cool because within the park it had something like 4 different climate zones including rain forest, dry forest, arid desert and one more I can’t remember. It also had waterfalls and 2 volcanos. Cool stuff.

The next day we went to Playa Samara and WOW, this was an incredible beach and fantastic stop! This white sand beach was so clean and safe. The water was almost as warm as bath water and we spent the entire day boogie boarding and having a blast. After our day of fun in the sun we ate a phenomenal dinner at a Mexican restaurant and headed back to Liberia.

I guess we didn’t take many pictures this day since we were in the water.
We spent the following day at another national park. This park was really huge and was known for it’s wetlands and for having over 200 bird species.
We saw a lot of wildlife in this park.

First, alligators! There were 2 and they were fighting, but only caught one on camera.

This cute little thing is a Coati Mundi. There were a bunch of them but then a car drove by and scared them all away.

Tons of monkeys! What do you think about monkeys? Cute or creepy? A little of both I think.

Iguanas are EVERYWHERE. Like squirrels here.

Ducks. I just realized I made that picture bigger than the others and I like it!
We saw tons of birds!