Exploring Manuel Antonio

After returning from whitewater rafting, we took a quick pool break and headed to our hotel’s beach for a bit of snorkeling.  The walk down to the beach was far more interesting than the beach itself and we were disappointed to find murky water, rocky bottom and no fish.  Pass for next time.

We returned to our hotel to find monkeys and sloths hanging around on the grounds and naturally, had to stop and stare.

Ended the day with dinner at El Avion, a place we spotted the night before and got there just in time for another amazing sunset.

The food was delicious; try the coconut shrimp, calamari and catch of the day which happened to be snapper.  But the coolest reason to visit aside from the views is the Fairchild C-123 that the restaurant is built around.  Does Ollie North and the Iran-Contra scandal ring a bell?
The airplane was part of one of the biggest scandals in the 1980’s when the Reagan Administration set up a bizarre network of arms sales to Iran designed to win release of US hostages held in Lebanon and raise money to fund the Nicaraguan, counter-revolutionary guerilla fighters, commonly referred to as the “Contras”.  By artificially inflating the prices of arms, “National Security Council” NSC official Oliver North, was able to reap profits that could be diverted to fund the counter-revolutionaries of the Cuban allied Sandinista government.  Of the $16 million raised, only $3.8 million actually funded the Contras. With the CIA’s help, they purchased several items, including two C-123 cargo planes, two C-7 planes, a Maule aircraft, spare parts, and munitions. They also built a secret airstrip on an American-owned, 30,000 acre ranch in northwest Costa Rica.
On October 5,1986, a US cargo plane, the twin sister, of El Avion’s own Fairchild C-123, was shot down over Nicaragua. A crew member Eugene Hasenfus, pilot hired by a private company to fly airlift and resupply missions parachuted to safety and was captured by the Sandinista army.  Led out of the jungle at gun point, Hasenfus’s existence set in motion an incredible chain of cover-ups and lies that would mushroom into one of the biggest scandals in American political history known as the Iran-Contra Affair. As a result of this successful Sandinista strike on Fairchild’s sister plane, the cargo operation was suspended and one of the C-123s was abandoned at the International Airport in San José.

In August 2000, El Avion purchased the abandoned Fairchild and shipped the pieces of the Iran-Contra relic to Quepos. The fuselage was shipped via ocean ferry because it was 10 inches too wide for the antiquated Chiquita Banana railroad bridges!  After hauling seven sections up the Manuel Antonio hill, the C-123 finally found its current cliff-side resting-place.

Now, the C-123 has been retired to less risqué endeavors as a restaurant, bar and an enduring Cold War relic.
You can eat food under its wings, have drinks in the fuselage pub or climb into the cockpit!

Take that for a history lesson.
Day 3 living #puravida

Alya