Vacation hasn’t even started yet and my decision to purchase a new lens for our trip to Costa Rica is already paying off. We ran into Costa Rican crocodiles. Our drive from San Jose to our home in Manuel Antonio started almost due west to the coast then followed the coast south. Just before reaching the ocean, we crossed the Rio Grande by the Carara Park, home to the third largest population of crocodiles in the world.
This post is part of our series on Costa Rica. If you want to see more about our travel section, read here.
If you are driving to any of the ocean cities, this is a great rest stop. Plan on half an hour to use the bathroom, see the crocodiles and order yourself a drink (smoothies for the kids and … well a little more aggressive for the adults).
To help you plan your trip, I embedded this map below. I tried dropping a pin where 34 crosses a river by Carara Park. If not, you can figure out where we were.
I’m sure there are tours you can take to see the crocodiles a little more. Costa Rica is home to very friendly people and they love to use their natural environment and personality to set up … we’ll call them tourist opportunities … for you to spend money on. But frankly, standing on this bridge is all the closer you ever feel like you need to get and it is very easy to do.
This was the first time I pulled out our 3D video camera. I’ll have to come back home to process and upload this. So if you don’t see the video yet in the post, please be patient. It’s coming.
I was really surprised about how aggressive these crocodiles were. I’ve been to the Everglades in Florida and you can nearly walk among the alligators and feel pretty safe. I watched someone throw a coconut down to these crocodiles and they lost their minds. They were fighting over it and biting each other and … wow. Glad I was 50 feet above them.
Here’s a slideshow of the crocodiles. Enjoy!
Don’t forget to follow me live on this trip on Twitter and Periscope @chrisashbach and on snapchat chris.ashbach. I’ll be updating the blog daily and live streaming and snapping every day. If you want to interact with me, hit me up on #dan330 and I can answer any questions or comments!
