Costa Rica Family Trip - Day 3 (Part 1 of 2)

After a nice restful night of sleep, our third day adventures were centered around a guided tour of Tamarindo Estuary.  The funniest party about this was finding the location and the right guide.  The adventure started with about a 15-minute walk from our Airbnb alongside the main road to just a general area where we were supposed to meet our guide "Luis".  We arrived but it wasn't clear that there was an obvious guide there, so we went down towards the banks of the river and found some guys working on boats and asked if they knew a "Luis".  They said they didn't but offered to be "Luis" if they needed to be and could take us on a tour instead.  They seemed to be having a good laugh about it, but finally after about another 15 minutes our real Luis showed up...apparently, he had gotten a flat tire in his car and had to call a friend to drop him off at our tour location.  After getting a few things sorted, we jumped on his small boat and headed out into the Estuary.

This turned out to be a several hour tour to see lots of different animals and birds and hopefully monkeys!  This picture was of some birds we saw amongst the mangrove trees.

Here was a picture of a big iguana that was crawling around.

Finally, after about an hour boat ride up the rivers, we parked and started walking on the banks of the river and into the countryside in hopes of tracking down some monkeys.  We walked about half a mile or more listening and tracking signs of a local group of howler monkeys which we finally found!  It was so cool to see these guys in the wild and have the kids see them.  There were probably four or five in this little group, and they stayed for a bit, but then headed off across the trees for another area.  We also saw some really cool alligators and many species of birds on the way back.  It was good that we just had a half day here as the temperatures were starting to kick up as we approached lunch time.  Super cool tour though!