Manuel Antonio

Ok so I found some energy to blog after all. So generally while living in Manuel Antonio I went to Spanish school in the morning, the beach in the afternoon and out on the town in the evenings and nights. It became a routine.

Here are some of my favorite places that I went to regularly. Mar Y Sombra was my favorite place to go to until it was bulldozed by the government anyway. Mar y Sombra had good food for lunch and then had those crazy weekend beach parties that were one of my favorite things about the area until the government ended it.

Wacky Wanda's Bar, where Wanda had Christmas in July parties every year and Thanksgiving meals and Fat Tuesday parties, Halloween, July 4th, Labor day and Memorial day celebrations. Any excuse to party was good enough for Wanda. Wanda was just that, wacky. One of her favorite tricks was to look up when a new tourist entered her bar and then say things like, "What the hell do you want? I suppose you want me to make you a drink or something. You swear swear swear and more swear expect me to just stop what I am doing and serve you, do you? Well %*%&#*#(#*@#&@@(@* you." She would rail on and on and all the customers in the bar would be laughing but the poor new tourists would look bewildered and some of them would meekly turn around and walk out but the ones that stayed found out that she was really a lovable mensch and actually a lot of fun to hang out around. Bobby was also a partner in the bar and he was always hammered on anything and everything he could get into his body. Sometimes I walked in the bar and he would be passed out cold on the floor behind the bar or crawling on his hands and knees unable to stand up. We laughed with Wanda but we laughed at Bobby. There was a short cute tica working at Wanda's for a while and everybody kept ordering top shelf drinks and she had to climb up on a stool and reach up for the bottles. She flashed her beautiful ass and legs each time she reached up. The patrons would order lots of top shelf drinks when she was working.

I also liked the restaurant at Villas El Parque that started out as the BS bar and grill. I liked sitting up at the bar and drinking beers while watching the birds and sloths and monkeys from the high perch the bar had. The food was simple bar stuff like burgers and nachos and it was cheap. The bar tender would call me up any time a hot girl came in to the bar and challenge me to come and pick her up. I tried to accommodate his wishes.

Then the restaurant was sold and became the Cafe Aqua Azul. The new owners were really nice Americans that came in and turned it into a fancy restaurant with high priced food. It was great food but it was out of my budget now. I still liked going there for drinks and watching the monkeys and birds but I hardly ever ate there anymore. I preferred the cheap bar food. I guess I have no class.

I also hung out at a hotel bar called Espadilla. It was the hotel we first stayed in with all the college kids when I arrived in Manuel Antonio. I liked the bar tender and we had a good time talking. I usually took my dates to this hotel because it was off the beaten track and more private so my reputation was safer there. Ya right like I worried about my reputation. No but my married dates liked that I went to a place where we weren't the talk of the town all the time. The bar tender set me up with a few dates too. I went out with a waitress from there also but she ended up getting married to the bar tender when she got pregnant. Abortion is murder in Costa Rica and is aggressively prosecuted. Such is life in Costa Rica.

I went to Hotel Plinio for dinner when I needed some flavor in my life. They have a menu with international foods like Thai and Indian. I usually ate the curries. My girlfriend worked there for a while so I also went to visit her.

I went to the gay bars also. Tutus had music early in the night and the students liked to go there to dance. We had sunset drinks there for happy hour a lot after the beach. There were almost fifty percent gays and straights as tourists in the general area of Manuel Antonio. About a dozen hotels and three bars catered to the gays and the rest were straight places. There were a few mixed places like Barba Roja and Bamboo Jam. They both had music and dancing mixed with a restaurant and straight and gay tourists went to both places.

I went to El Banco Bar to play pool. They also had music and dancing a few nights a week. There was always a lot of drugs available with the crowd at El Banco. I remember one night there where two hookers got into a fight and one clobbered the other one so bad that we all thought she was dead. Everybody fled the bar before the police showed up and the hooker survived with just a bad head wound. The pool of blood left behind made it hard to believe the woman survived. The bar closed down for good not long after that night.

After the fight at El Banco Bar, the crowd just moved over to the disco Arco Iris and carried on. The disco stays open all night and gets pretty crazy by around 3 in the morning. People are all drunk and stoned by then and the low life crack heads start to prey on them.

I met a lot of good people in Manuel Antonio, both tourists and locals. Every morning when I sat at the El Milagro cafe for my coffee I would watch the birds and monkeys or the tourists walking by. The coffee was good and so was the company I met at the cafe.

There was a naked beach at Manuel Antonio when I first arrived. I always like going naked in the ocean so I went to it frequently. It was mostly gay men and European girls at the naked beach. There was a lot of gay sex down in the bushes but that isn't my thing I just went swimming and sunning. The naked beach was suddenly no longer allowed with no real explanation and now it is no longer a clothing optional beach but it was fun while it lasted.

The Manuel Antonio National Park was always worth some hiking around in. I like to go to the beach there and watch the tourists carefully place their valuables in a bag or something and look around for people then go in swimming if there were no potential thieves close by. There was only one problem with their plan. The thieves were monkeys that climbed out of the trees as soon as a bag was left unattended and they would snatch the bag and run back up in the trees to go through the bags looking for things to eat. The digital cameras and other things were just tossed down and left there. It was really funny to see the tourists come back and find their things stolen. They would call the rangers over thinking it was a human thief and the rangers would explain that the monkeys were doing it. Then the ranger would walk them over to the tree line and their non edible items would be strewn all over the ground. It happened every day in the park.

The titi monkeys broke into my condo three times and absolutely wrecked the place each time. The first time I left a window open and they came in. The second time I left the patio door cracked open. The third time I forgot to lock the patio door and they opened the door themselves. Each time I came home to find shit all over the floors, walls, furniture and everything else. All the glass things were broken. Any food left out was torn open and scattered all over the floor half eaten and all the light bulbs would be broken. What a mess. I finally learned to lock it all up tight after the third time.

One morning I was taking an early morning shower. I had a shower with a view if I left the window opened and that is what I did usually. I was casually showering away with my back to the window and a howler monkey crept up to the window and took a big breath then let out one of their ear splitting howls that they are named for right into my open window. It is a good thing I was in the shower because he scared the crap out of me. My heart skipped quite a few beats before the echos died down enough for me to recover. The howler monkey was outside in the tree when I recovered laughing with his buddies. That is what shotguns were invented for.

Despite all my problems with the monkeys I really loved seeing them and watching their antics. I never realized that monkeys fall out of trees so often until I sat and watched them for a few years. They are fearless jumpers and sometimes they miss judge things and come up short. They hit the ground and just run right back up the trees. The only ones I saw that fell and were injured or killed, fell into traffic crossing the wires from one side of the road to the other and were run over by cars.

The drivers in Costa Rica are some of the worst in the world. They only have two speeds, 60 and 60 with their horn blowing. They pass on blind corners and over blind hills. They pull out to pass without looking at all. They typically make a sign of the cross just before they make a stupid move thinking that Jesus is going to save them from their own stupidity but unfortunately it doesn't work that way. My next door neighbor was killed while I was there and several of my friends were injured in accidents. I was injured in a minor rear ender while I was in a taxi one day but other than that I was lucky to be alive considering all the close calls.

The planes aren't any safer. They compete with Aeroflot for the worst safety records. One day my plane made nine attempts to land at the airport only to gun the engines at the last second and circle around to try again. We went through tree branches on one of the failed attempts as we tried to get airborn again. There were lots of plane crashes in the years that I lived in Costa Rica. I didn't trust the roads or the air there. I started to stay home more and more as I saw all the accidents piling up. So if you go there be careful. It is safer to just stay in one place and go fishing or something than to travel around in Costa Rica.