We hired a guide to give us a tour of the park. It worked out pretty nice for us, because we had a guide just for the two of us, and we saw later that most guides had groups of 5 or more. Our guide had a telescope whose lens matched up nicely with our Canon Powershot camera, and he was able to take pictures for us using our camera and his telescope.
As we entered the park, there were some iguanas taking in the morning sun.
Our guide showed us some nesting bats, and a beehive high in the trees that we would have otherwise missed.
We saw some basilisk lizards. When they run, the stand upright and spread out the arms and feet. I wasn't able to get a picture of one running, but if you want to see one in action you can look at this YouTube.
We then came across a group of white faced monkeys.
We also saw two-toed sloths sleeping in the tops of the trees. They looked like big dirty mops.
Later we saw a three-toed sloth climbing in a tree.
We then came to a group of squirrel monkeys (monos titis) and howler monkeys, who were messing with each other over treetop territory.
Squirrel monkeys are on the verge of extinction, if you want to know more click here. http://www.savingmonotiti.com/
Some whitetail deer were grazing on the edge of the road, oblivious to humans.
In some parts, the forest floor was covered with hundreds of red crabs. 
After our nature walk, we went to the beach in the park for swimming and relaxing. The beach was perfect - a small bay with calm water that made swimming easy, and just perfect jungle scenery.
These rocks are believed to have been a pre-historic turtle trap. Turtles would get trapped at low tide back when this worked.
The park also has a beach near the entrance that is just as beautiful, but no one swims there because the other beach is so perfect, while this one has crashing waves and rip tides. If we would have had more time, we could have visited a few more beaches further in the park nicer than these.
After the beach, we decided to visit the tourist shops along the beachfront in the town of Manuel Antonio. I got a t-shirt, Fabienne got a sarong, and we looked at lots of jewelry and handcrafts. We ran into our Rasta friend from the night before, who offered to sell us his cool Syrian shirt.
We ate a nice lunch of grilled chicken and rice in the market, and as it was already 2pm, we needed to hit the road and head for Uvita, about 60 kms (36 miles) south of there. 60 kilometers does not sound like much, until you see this road.
This was the all-time champion of bad roads. Interestingly it was not just bad, it was enormously wide for the first 15 kms or so, easily wide enough for six lanes. But is was nothing but a dirt road that was a sea of ruts with somewhat of driving lane on either edge.
Sometimes only one side of the road would be passable, so you would have to drive on the wrong side of the road for a long stretch, even though there was traffic coming from the other direction. And sometimes, since there was traffic driving the wrong direction coming at you, the easiest thing to do was to drive on their side of the road instead. No rules, whatever works.
This road seemed endless, and just a disaster in a hundred different ways. We didn't stop to take a picture, as I was having too much fun seeing how fast our rental SUV could go over the ruts. There is a YouTube of some of the highway here, though it does not really show the bad part of the road. http://youtube.com/watch?v=zAuUfyVTV_I
The last 10 km of the trip was on a paved highway, what a relief to finally get off that road. It was raininig when we got to Uvita. We drove around the town, trying to figure out where to stay, and finally settled on some cabins in the hills a little south of town.
The rain kept coming down hard that evening, and we drove into Uvita to look for a restaurant for the evening. The number of options seemed pretty limited, and we settled on the restaurant that had the most cars parked in front of it. It was a nice open air place, and they had great seafood. I ordered a guaparinha and all was good. I ordered a second one and was saddened to find that there were no more green limes left. It turns out, green limes are not that popular except for tourist cocktails, since the local lime is the lima mandarina. So that was my last guaparinha. From what we could tell, the restaurant had no name or address either. It's simply the restaurant by the bridge and liquor store on the highway leaving Uvita, who needs to know more?
We headed back to our cabin and found a huge moth posed on the window.
We finished the evening sitting on the balcony of our cabin listening to the sounds of the jungle. The jungle was full of the sounds of chimes, like some tibetan bells being played in an odd rhythm. Or like the random pings of hundreds of sonars. I think it must have been the bats. Somehow that species is audible.
Click here to hear a series of 4 second audio recordings of the bats.
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