After Monteverde, we headed south to Quepos, a local town near the oh-so-touristy Manuel Antonio National Park. We spent some time along the beach, where we were told to watch our bags, theft was a big thing there. I was glad that I decided to cut out Manuel Antonio from the agenda at the last minute. The beach was beautiful though. We had about 3 hours to kill before our shuttle to Dominical, so we explored and got some cocktails.
Our aerial view of Manuel Antonio National Park
Our plane, even smaller than the first two planes!
The beach!
And of course, our delicious cocktails! Mine was called Monkey on the Beach. It was SO strong. The rum in Costa Rica is strooong haha
After our drinks, we got on the shuttle for a quick 45 minute drive to Dominical. We were pleasantly surprised by our hotel, the Roca Verde. I swear I would go back there just for the food! They had the BEST restaurant. Anyway, the next morning, we got up early for our tour to Nauyaca Falls. We waited for a while, and kept waiting, but they didn't show up to pick us up, so we got the owner of the hotel to drive us :) When we arrived, we were given our horses, and mine was named Teletubby. There were a good amount of people on the tour, so there were also a lot of horses. The horses seemed to be competitive with each other, always bumping into one another and trying to squeeze through other horses to get to the front. They would also just randomly start running, which I HATED!! I didn't mind the horseback riding until they started to run. My ass was sore for about 3 days after haha. We stopped at Don Lulo's house for breakfast, he was the owner of the tour. After breakfast, we only had a short ride to the falls, which I was thankful for. When we arrived,
my breath was literally taken away. I cannot even describe this place well enough. By far, the most beautiful place I have
ever seen so far. The falls were tiered, and they went up even further than what is pictured. I was too afraid to take my camera out on to the rocks to get a better picture, because the current was way too strong.
Here is the best that I could get :)
In the middle of the picture you will see the two ledges between the two large falls. The upper ledge was the one that we jumped off of! This was an experience that I would never forget. It was scary trying to climb up, because the water was pushing us down and we couldn't see a thing. Good thing there were guides to help us up.
My horse, Teletubby. I was not too thrilled with his urge to bump into other horse, my knees was so bruised afterward!
After jumping off of the ledge and swimming for a while, we got on our horses again and headed back to Don's for some yummy lunch. Once we returned back to the starting point, we were waiting for our ride and a woman who worked with the tour started to talk to me, in Spanish. The whole trip I tried so hard to use as much Spanish as I could, because I pretty much took my Spanish class just to use it in Costa Rica :) I was always nervous to use it around the locals, but I got by. This woman, however, only spoke a little bit of English, and she decided to test my Spanish. She spoke to me slowly, and asked me some simple questions, all of which I replied to, in Spanish! I was shocked at how much I understood and how much I could actually reply to. The woman told me (in Spanish) that my pronunciation was really good, and she was surprised that I had only studied it for 5 months in college. After our delightful conversation, I felt so good.
I just had a leisure conversation with a local, in Spanish!!!! I was one step closer to my goal of becoming fluent. YEAHH!!! :)
We spent the rest of the day at the beach right by the hotel, and we played with the hundreds of hermit crabs that were there. We got lunch and dinner at the hotel, and like I mentioned before, the food was SO goooood! I also got the chance to play with the most adorable kitten that belonged to the family that owned the hotel. So cute!!
Look at her face!
We also tried to touch one of the hundreds of Geckos that were all over the walls of the hotel, but we were not successful haha.
The next day, we had a scheduled tour with Southern Expeditions to go to Cano Island and snorkel. I was SO excited for this, as I had never been snorkeling. The guides picked us up early, and told us that we were stopping for breakfast on the way, so everything seemed fine. Two minutes later, the guide says that he has bad news...our trip had to be canceled because the weather was too bad and it would be too dangerous to be in the water. My heart was crushed! This was the only point of the trip that was flawed. Everything had gone so smoothly, except for this. It took me the rest of the morning to absorb the bad news, and then we tried to make the best of it by going to the Hacienda Baru Wildlife Refuge and search for sloths. It started to pour, and we didn't even see one sloth! Everyone kept saying that sloths were everywhere around Dominical, and you basically just had to look up, and you would see one. Well, we didn't see anything! Besides that, we had a good hike in the pouring rain, even though we didn't see anything. We headed back to the hotel for dinner, which was my favorite part of the day haha. I had the BEST Mahi Mahi, I mean, the BEST.
Overall, Domincal was beautiful, and I would like to go back to Nauyaca Falls.
