Last Thursday Jamie flew in from North Carolina to spend a week at a place called Manuel Antonio on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Manuel Antonio is a small costal national park noted for its abundant wildlife and beautiful beaches, consequently there is now a 7km chain of hotels and resturants between the nearest town, Quepos and the park entrance. Jamie had fortunately booked a hotel/appartment for us that left us with a huge walk of 100m to the park entrance or alternatively 100m to the beach. Needless to say it was a really laid back week, which I needed after the last 6-7weeks on the road in Central America.

Manuel Antonio National Park was awesome, well deserverd of it reputation for wildlife and beauty while there we saw spider monkeys, white-heded capuchins, coti, iguanas, a sloth, racoons, howler monkeys, crabs as well as various birds and insects. It was so impressive that even after four hours of hiking through mud even Jungle-Girl Jamie was 'oohing' and 'arrrhing' at some of capuchins, dare I say even changing some of her preduices on small furry animals.

One night during the week we had dinner and watched an amazing sunset at a bar called El Avion. The center piece of the bar, other than the magnificent view, was a Farchild C-123 cargo plane which was painstaking shipped to its current location after the Iran-Contra scandle broke in the 1980s. The plane was one of the two large cargo plans used by 'private US citizens' (authorsed by Ronald Regan and his pal Oliver North) to deliver weapons to the anti government rebels in Nicaragura. After its sister plane was shot down and the story broke this plane was abandoned in San Jose - the bar owner purchased it for $3k. This was definitely one of the coolest bars I've been to anywhere......

Jamie and I had a great week even despite my very, very unlucky run at scrabble. WARNING: If Jamie ever asks you to play it on her travel scrabble board refuse as I believe that she has had some voodoo/witchcraft/curse placed on the board so that it only allow her to win using two and three letter words. Yeah, I don't take losing well..........Maureen I'm sending her back to you, goodluck!