DRAKE BAY - Anna did a semester abroad 10 years ago in Costa Rica and never got the chance to visit the Osa Peninsula.  It was a pretty difficult place to get to back then and still is a bit out of the way today... but we got here and it is gorgeous!  You have to take a boat down-river to the ocean and then down the coast to Drake Bay... on the way we saw this "little" guy waiting for dinner...

We stayed at a place called "Mirador" and it was a bit of a splurge for us at 40/night per person, but that at least included meals.  There aren't any cars and there aren't many people so it's very peaceful and you can't beat the view.  Here's where we stayed.

This is what we had to look at all day...

For the entire trip Anna has been wanting to see scarlet maccaws in the wild.  We missed them in Belize, missed them in Guatemala, missed them up in northern Costa Rica... but we found them here!  There were quite a few of them too, and they are so loud that you could hear them a half mile away.  This one perched himself in a nearby tree to check us out (pardon the zoom)...

This pair did the same... they were very curious about us, and we them.  They are big beautiful colorful creatures that sound like cats fighting.

Anna loves these plants.  I think they're called "touch me nots" and they have the coolest defense mechanism against insects. 

If you touch them they fold their leaves like this...

Cool thing about the Mirador was the dinners were all communal... we sat with all the other guests so eating was a pretty social event.  Most were Europeans so you can bet politics never came up   We met a lot of cool folks... heres a picture of our friends Wolfgang and Timon from Berlin...

Wolfgang and Timon took a hike with us one day and led us to this cool bridge...

And we found this curious guy...

Then we came to this gorgeous beach that had a zillion tiny hermit crabs on the rocks...

Anna loved the maccaws but my favorite part was a night hike in the jungle.  The skies opened on us and we walked along the beach in a lightning storm but we saw some fantastic wildlife.  We saw giant smoky mountain frogs (known to eat kittens), a chunk-head snake, a tail-less scorpion (I held it), a venemous cat-eyed snake (held that too), masked tree frogs, marine toads, huge caterpillars, bioluminescent moss... and the quintessential rainforest creature - the red-eyed tree frog!  They are extremely hard to find, and I've wanted to see one since the last time I visited Costa Rica... so I was pretty excited.  I unfortunately didn't take this photo but here he is...

The trip into Drake Bay was a 2-day long complete pain in the ass so we decided to fly out.  It was expensive but easy and the views were so spectacular it turned out to be another one of the highlights.