Today, we woke up to the sound of lashing rain. We had planned to be the first ones at Manuel Antonio National Park when it opened at 7 a.m., but the rain was a bit of a deterrent.
Finally, we agreed: It’s just rain! We won’t melt! And off we went. The only change we made in our plans was to leave our swimsuits behind. The park includes several private beaches where we had hoped to frolic for awhile, but we decided to make this a hiking day instead.
Following Carlos’s advice, we parked in a lot near the entrance to the park and ignored all the touts trying to lure us with more expensive parking options, tours, and crap for sale. We may not have been THE first in the park, but we were darn close. As Carlos predicted, the rain ceased within minutes.
Most trails were paved, and hills generally had easy-to-maneuver stairs or ramps. Bathrooms popped up periodically. As jungle hikes go, it was a fairly chill place to visit. We saw one sloth, a couple agoutis (those giant hamsters), a few cool birds and colorful crabs, and the blue morpho butterflies, which freak you out with their flashes of iridescence. I appreciated both the high-level coastline and rainforest views, as well as the ground-level access to the beaches and forest floor. As we were leaving around noon, mobs of people were going in. Tony and I smugly high-fived over having the park mostly to ourselves.
We tackled every trail and even paused at each beach to enjoy the scenery, only slightly bummed that we hadn’t brought our swimsuits.
Tony, wearing his Tevas, ventured into the surf a bit more than I did, laced as I was into my hiking shoes. At one point, he wandered up the beach while I rested on this fallen tree, soaking up the sounds and smells of the ocean. I sat here for more than five minutes before I realized my seat mate was a ginormous iguana. How did I miss him?
FYI, the combination of 100 percent humidity, gravity, and the action of moving our bodies to trek up and down hills actually results in clothes stretching several sizes, and my awesome hiking pants were easily three inches longer by the end of this day. Our clothes were drenched with sweat, and my fingers shriveled like raisins from the weird combination of dehydration and perspiration.
After almost five hours, we headed back to our room for a shower. We were ridiculously smelly and dirty. Once clean, we went to El Avion for lunch. We went for the cheesy airplane, but the food, sangria, and view were nothing to sneeze at.
This kitschy restaurant boasts a plane leftover from the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s. Here’s the info from the El Avion website:
Our Fairchild C-123 was a part of one of the biggest scandals in the 1980’s. The Reagan Administration set up a bizarre network of arms sales to Iran designed to win release of US hostages held in Lebanon and raise money to fund the Nicaraguan, counter-revolutionary guerilla fighters, commonly referred to as the “Contras”. By artificially inflating the prices of arms, “National Security Council” NSC official Oliver North, was able to reap profits that could be diverted to fund the counter-revolutionaries of the Cuban allied Sandinista government.
Of the $16 million raised, only $3.8 million actually funded the Contras. With the CIA’s help, they purchased several items, including two C-123 cargo planes, two C-7 planes, a Maule aircraft, spare parts, and munitions. They also built a secret airstrip on an American-owned, 30,000 acre ranch in northwest Costa Rica.
On October 5,1986, a US cargo plane, the twin sister, of El Avion’s own Fairchild C-123, was shot down over Nicaragua. A crew member Eugene Hasenfus, pilot hired by a private company to fly airlift and resupply missions. parachuted to safety and was captured by the Sandinista army.
Led out of the jungle at gun point, Hasenfus’s existence set in motion an incredible chain of cover-ups and lies that would mushroom into one of the biggest scandals in American political history known as the Iran-Contra Affair. As a result of this successful Sandinista strike on our Fairchild’s sister plane, the cargo operation was suspended and one of the C-123s was abandoned at the International Airport in San José.
In August 2000, we purchased the abandoned Fairchild and shipped the pieces of the Iran-Contra relic to Quepos. The fuselage was shipped via ocean ferry because it was 10 inches too wide for the antiquated Chiquita Banana railroad bridges! After hauling seven sections up the Manuel Antonio hill, the C-123 finally found its current cliff-side resting-place.
Now, our C-123 has been retired to less risqué endeavors as a restaurant, bar and an enduring Cold War relic. Join us for food under its wings, drinks in the fuselage pub or climb into the cockpit!
The restaurant was crowded, but nobody was in the plane bar when we were there at lunch. I climbed up into the cockpit and played pilot for a minute.
Later, I practiced a little yoga at a small covered space next to our treehouse while rain pounded the metal roof.
And then we braved the downpour to eat some comidas typicas at this fun place. I just can’t get enough of the casado. Black beans, rice, a green salad, some fried plantains, a piece of fish. So simple, but so delicious. Yum!
