We ventured out of the Resort today to explore some of the nearby countryside and wildlife. We are in kind of an isolated area of Costa Rica, along the Nicoya Peninsula. Fortunately, there was still lots to explore in the nearby jungle! We headed out to the Curu Wildlife Park. Our first stop once there was to see a few of the monkeys that have been rescued from bad situations as pets. These little guys were sooooo cute. They were in an enslosed region in the wildlife park, partially to help protect them from the other animals since they were not raised in the wild. They were super cute and friendly.
We left the enclosure, and headed around the rest of the park, hoping to catch some monkeys in their natural habitat, and we quickly found a grove of mango trees that had tons of monkeys just hanging out and munching on some mangos. This little guy wasn't scared of us at all, and as you can see, he was thoroughly enjoying his mango treat!

We continued the hike up an ledge, and found a beautiful trail overlooking the deserted beach below.

Cris was pleased to find his very favorite kind of trail....steep incline, and very rugged. He hiked up quite a way by himself, after those of us in flipflops had to abandon the trail due to very slippery leaves and roots. He was headed in the direction of some VERY noisy Howler monkeys.

The other crazy thing we encountered on our hike were billions of these little brightly colored crabs. We first noticed them closer to the beach/sand, so it kind of made sense, then we continued seeing them all the way up the trail! The ground was literally covered in them. It was so funny when a loud noise startled them, and the whole ground started scattering with the little crazy crabs.

our view from the lookout on the trail

The obligatory "cris skipping rocks" picture in Costa Rica!

Just as we were leaving the park this little Lemur scampered across the trail!

It was so great to get out into the beautiful countryside to explore a little. It has been a fairly difficult for us to communicate, with our extremely limited spanish, but tonight 4 more friends join the party at the resort, and 2 of them are fluent Spanish speakers, so i expect that to help out quite a bit! Even so, we are having an amazing time, and we are so grateful to have the opportunity to explore this beautiful country.

Today our adventure continued on a supersweet zipline tour. I have a few pictures from the tour that i will post tomorrow. tomorrow is our last day at the resort, and then on Tuesday we are heading up to see the Volcano. We are loving our time here, but we miss the girls like CRAZY!!! Both of the girls really like Iguanas (aka "scary guy"), and there are some crazy super sized iguanas all over the property here. Every time we see one we think how much they would love to see all these "scary guy's". We are looking forward to getting the biggest hugs and lots of kisses when we finally get to see our sweet girls on Thursday.