Costa Rica, Pacuare River Rafting

After trying white water rafting in Honduras on a small river we decided to go all out and throw ourselves down a world class set of rapids here in Costa Rica.

The rio Pacuare is one of the top 5 white water rafting rivers in the world, due to its fierce rapids ranging from small 2's to epic 4's down an 18 mile stretch of river with pristine rainforest on either side of the banks.

We arrived in Turrialba, a small town in Costa Rica's main rafting region, and found a great company called Rio Loco's Tropical Tours Rafting (as featured in the New York Times - http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/travel/22CostaRica.html?pagewanted=all). The following day the team, including the guide Chalo, came to pick us up for our adventure.

Words really cannot describe how cool this trip was, from gentle rafting thought to walls of water enveloping the boat, "Class IV: major obstructions, big, unavoidable waves, distinct risk of flipping — in short, fun."

We had an amazing time with our crewmates from Belgium and Holland. Even though it peed it down all day, the adrenaline kept us pumped and ready. Check out the picks and the vids.

Parque National Manual Antonio, Monkeys

There were loads of different types of monkeys in the national park, bigs ones way up in the trees and smaller whited faced ones in the lower canopy.

As we were walking through a trail up from the beach we heard a pack of them in the trees and we waited. To our surprise they came right past us, I dont know who was more scared!

The older ones had sharp dirty teeth, but the younger ones were pretty cute. We stayed back and let them pass through, quite an experience!

Parque National Manual Antonio, sloths

This park is full of life, here is a beautiful example off the Costa Rican two-toed (Choloepus hoffmanni) sloth.

They were just hanging out in the trees about 30ft above our heads. The green tinge to their coat is from an alguie which sticks to them in the humid rainy seasons, I can feel for them as I am currently going through three t-shirts a day - it's so hot and humid here!

Check out the video, don't you think the face look errily human, like a small boys head on an extra large, wet, teddy bear...

Costa Rica - Parque National Manual Antonio

Continuing our travels down the coast exploring national parks, we're in a port town called Quepos. Just 9km down the coast is Parque National Manual Antonio, a coastal national park which was saved from developers in 1972 (although Maudie helped move some trees today...).

There are loads of animals in this park, and it's split on the peninsular is not unlike Railay beach in Thailand, a 50 meter shard of beach on each side connecting a bulb of land in the sea to the mainland.

But what the developers missed was the worlds gain, this beautiful area has epic trails from the beaches through the cliffs, along palmforests and tropical rainforest. And the animals were absolutely fantastic. Here are the landscape images, animal videos will follow...

Costa Rica - Parque National Carara

The Carara national parque is about 1km from the Crocodile bridge, it straddles the dry forests of the northwest and the rainforest's of the Pacific lowlands. And it's HOT!

We went there in search of Scarlet Macaws, having read all about them in the book 'Last of the Macaws', a true Belizian story about one woman's plight to save the last 200 birds in Belize (before the Canadian electricity company Fortis built a dam and wiped out their habitat).

The place is literally buzzing with life and sounds, we set off at 7am and managed to see the macaws deep in their daytime nesting spot high in the trees (at night they fly to the mangroves on the coast to take refuge in a safer area). The monkeys were huge, about 3.5ft tall and they moved in packs, the video really doesn't do their tree jumping beauty justice! You can hear the screeching background noise of the bugs and birds, amazing.

There was so much growing - everywhere fruit trees were spilling out treats for the residents and the size of the older trees were outstanding, some 250ft tall and everything seemed to exist perfectly together. We spent 5 hours exploring the trails with our heads permanently cranked towards the jungle canopy, fabulous fun.