Viaje por carretera a Quepos y Manuel Antonio Reserva or Road Trip to Quepos and Manuel Antonio Reserve

Well the misses and I are off again, this time to visit one of Costa Rica’s most popular tourist towns, Quepos. Quepos is a small town, about 22,000 people, and is best known for two things; sport fishing and Manuel Antonio Reserve. Each February hundreds of fishermen and fisherwomen converge on Quepos for the Billfish Cup, a qualifier for the Offshore World Championship tournament in April. It’s not unheard of for a boat to hookup over 30 billfish in a day! This year the winning team caught and released 63 billfish in 3 days, and won a whopping $8,000.00! They also won custom Championship rings, fishing gear and a cooler. Not sure what this one costs but the Offshore championship costs $12,000.00 per team. Better pay a little more than the qualifier!

Second, and almost as rewarding, Quepos is known as the “Entryway to Manuel Antonio Reserve”. Impressive, huh! That’s why we’re here, missed the fishing tourney that I’m sure we would have taken, hands down, so why not go to the park? 

We loaded up El Haut Rod and headed off to the ferry for another easy drive. Just take highway 17, 23, 27, 34 and look for the sign, “The Falls Resort at Manuel Antonio”. Simple, but we missed it, so we decided to stop for lunch and regroup. Perfect timing, there was a restaurant immediately to our left so that’s the place. Looked kinda interesting, it was the front end of a Fairchild C123 plane sticking out from under the roof. Closer look we discovered that it was the entire airplane under the roof and the fuselage was the bar. Pretty cool!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Turns out this plane, and another one just like it, was acquired by the CIA to fly goodies into Nicaragua. Unfortunately for pilot Eugene Hasenfus (yep, real name) his C123 was shot down on October 5, 1986, while making a run for a guy named Ollie. Well, once good ole Eugene was marched out of the jungle by the Sandinistas, Ollie needed to find another way to do business. So……left abandoned in San Jose, this C123 was bought in 2000, disassembled and shipped to Manuel Antonio where today it serves as a bar and restaurant. Decent food, too.