Costa Rica 2023: Rainmaker Park

Our first day in Manuel Antonio started with a trip to the Rainmaker Park full of spectacular hanging bridges, nature, jungle, and waterfalls!

Costa Rica is known for their export of Palm oil.  We spent several miles driving through Palm farms learning all about palm oil.  Palm dates grow on the palms, are harvested, and turned into oil for use in food or the beauty industry.

The Park is a 2 mile round trip hike that follows a beautiful path through the jungle.  It truly was magical and the trees were huge.  

We met this little poison dart frog on the way and learned all about his dangerous little self. Fascinating that they emit a poison toxin that they get when eating their main source of food, ants.

The hanging bridges were spectacular. and once we started we got to cross several bridges giving us beautiful views of the jungle.

Turns out you can drink the water right out of the mountain.  Pretty cool.

Our guide Elias was AMAZING. He could find any creature and all sorts of amazing jungle details to show us.

I think this bridge above was my favorite.  Such a gorgeous and fun bridge to cross. 

We found ourselves at a wonderful little waterfall and enjoyed an hour of swimming and exploring.

Once we finished at the Rainmaker Park we headed down to our local beach.  By local it was a super sketchy downhill drive to literally park right on the beach.  I have never experienced such wide open, clean, people free beaches in my life.  They were pristine and so fun!

We played for a few hours before heading home.  On our way back to the car a local kept pointing and telling us something was in the trees.  Us Americans thought he was selling us something and ignored, but he was persistent and finally we decided to see what all the fuss was....

A SLOTH, in the flesh and sound asleep.

SO CUTE!

Later that night it POURED jungle rain on us.  The adults decided it would be fun to walk to dinner in the rain so we set the kids up with chicken nuggets and headed down the hill to a little open air restaurant for dinner and drinks!

 Great ending to our day!