This past weekend was amazing. My program took us to the Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio, which is on the Pacific coast. First of all, it was beautiful. Second, no one was complaining this weekend. Third, we saw so many animals I didn’t even want to turn my camera off in case something else came into view as we walked. We saw at least five sloths within 40 minutes. Some of them were just curled up in the trees, and others were actually moving. They don’t move fast, but it wasn’t that slow either. Apparently the other kinds of sloths (I think the ones we saw were two-toed…) move much, much more slowly. We even saw one on the ground. And monkeys too! At one point, there were so many monkeys that we were just surrounded everywhere we looked. There were signs that said, “Do not feed the monkeys” but it didn’t matter if people paid attention to them or not because if you had food, the monkeys would just come up and steal it from you, regardless of whether or not the food was being offered to them. Our guide told us that sometimes a few monkeys would bang on a trashcan so that people come over and watch the commotion. Meanwhile, other monkeys are busy rummaging through all the unattended items left on the beach. But even more alarming than the monkeys were the iguanas. They were everywhere we went, but the ones I’m talking about are the ones that were at our hotel. They were scary. Our cabin was the very last one at the top of this small mountain, so it was rather isolated. Iguanas were everywhere. Every time we turned around, there were more. The most frightening part was when we were coming back from breakfast one morning. As we got closer to our cabin, we saw a few on the grass and when we got to one that was directly in our path, we squatted down to get a closer look. We had taken some bananas with us to eat later and then all of a sudden, an iguana jumped out of nowhere ONTO a friend of mine and just snatched his banana. We jumped back and looked around and saw that iguanas were emerging from the bushes, jumping off the roofs, crawling out from under the sidewalk, and then that all of them were running at us. And they move fast. It was like a scene from Jurassic Park. And by the way, some of these iguanas were giant-sized. Some were well over 2 feet long, and fat. After you got over the shock that they jump at you, they were interesting to watch. They really are unattractive looking animals when they start to molt. It was kind of cool to see so many animals this weekend, but at the same time it wasn’t. We were at a national park, and the only reason we saw so many animals was because they are used to being fed by all the tourists. What a shame.
