Up early morning to try surfing, figuring I can’t do much worse than yesterday. I bit it with the same consistency, and Scott does one better by chipping his board. We make lame attempts to stay on the board for more than a second, give up after a few hours, pay a nice surcharge for Scott’s damage, and thus ends our sorry surfing attempts in Jaco.
Manuel Antonio Nature Reserve is our next stop. It’s only 60 kilometers away, but we’ve learned that actual distance means little to nothing here. It’s all about road quality; varying between dirt and asphalt, and 100 kilometers can each take 2 hours to drive. We get lucky with only mildly potholed blacktop for most of the way, so the drive’s under 2 hours.
After finding a decent hotel in the town of Manuel Antonio, I head for the reserve of the same name with my brothers as the rest of the family lazes on the beach. Right at the entrance, we spot several iguanas each easily 2 feet long. The rest of the tour doesn’t live up to that introduction, with our animal sightings limited to 2 less-than-energetic sloths, a few monkeys high in the canopy, random lizards, and orange crabs with purple claws that seemed to own a large portion of the trail. Not thrilling, but definitely better than imitating a beach chair after too much time in the too-tiny car.
We wrap up the day in our tiny town with a bad meal and an American movie: some random steakhouse and “Minority Report.” Can’t escape from Tom Cruise, even if you jet to the jungle...