Saturday 2/2/08 Heredia, Costa Rica
I spent the past week traveling with my parents, two aunts, one uncle, and two close family friends. We took an organized tour and visited Arenal Volcano, the cloud forests of Monterverde, and a beach on the Papagayo Gulf in northern Costa Rica.
Before I set off on the bike trip, I wasn’t sure if I’d enjoy going on a trip in Costa Rica that was arranged by a tour company. I feared spending a week bouncing from soul-less hotel to soul-less hotel and being treated by local people as just another rich tourist fresh off his tour van. With the tour over, I’m happy to report that all went well. The hotels, although Western in appearance, were not quite as big as I was afraid they’d be. The hotel and restaurant staff I spoke to on the tour were incredibly kind and enjoyed practicing their English with me. The food, mostly served via buffets, was a welcome reprieve from my banana sandwiches! Best of all, I was able to spend time with my mother and father and tap into the nostalgia deposited in my brain by past family vacations. Nostalgia is good stuff when you can enjoy it with the people who helped create it.
Above: My feet and a volleyball game at the biggest hotel we stayed at on the tour.
Of the three spots we visited, I was most fascinated with the forests of Monteverde. Established by Quakers decades ago, the forest reserves at Monteverde showcase some of the most pristine cloud forest environments on the planet today. Because cloud forests need high altitude and cool weather to spit forth all of the magical plants and animals that make them unique, and because warm temperatures caused by global warming are forcing the right conditions for their existence to float up to higher and higher altitudes with each passing year, cloud forests are becoming increasingly rare. Forests in Guatemala have already vanished, and Costa Rica’s cloud forests are under threat.
Above: Me in the mountains outside of Monteverde
When you enter the forests of Monterverde, the first sense to begin going haywire in your body is your sense of sight. Green radiates from every living thing around you and makes you feel as if you have just stepped out from beyond the reaches of typical life and into the center of a sea of moss. Green leaves of every shape imaginable, green bark, green moss growing on top of green bark, green insects, green feathers on birds. Green is it. No other color has a chance of feeling comfortable in a cloud forest.
Above: Many organic surfaces in the forest looked like this.
Primary forests, areas in which the vegetation is at its maximum thickness and maturity, line the narrow forest paths like skyscrapers line sidewalks. Attempts at penetrating it without a strong arm and a razor-sharp machete would be futile. Like a fungus left to go wild on the skin of a fruit, the forest sprouts from the surface of the earth in healthy clumps and puffy bundles. No land is left uncovered and no trees are left to enjoy the sun and air all to themselves. Organisms grow on top of one another in a fierce battle for sunlight. Orchids cling to tree limbs. Ferns fan out over small shrubs reaching for the sky. When a tree falls, the hole it has left in the canopy allows valuable rays of sun light to sneak their way down to the earth below where seedlings awaken in their warmth.
“Do you see this area to our right?” the guide asked as he pointed to a thick section of forest marked by trees with thin trunks.
“This is called secondary forest. Thirty years ago, this was a field of grass used as cow pasture. Look at what it has become.”
“Amazing!” I exclaimed. “How long will it take for it to look like the primary forest over there?” I asked.
“One hundred years. In other parts of the world, it could take thousands of years for a forest to recover to its natural state. In some places, forests can never recover no matter how much time they have. Here, only 100 years.”
Above: Wild tarantula in Monteverde.
Seeing how nature could so rapidly reclaim land that had been stripped of all that made it once mystical and unique spun a tight knot of hope in my gut, one that stayed with me and beat away like a tiny heartbeat until we came upon the gift shops and roads that leaked away from the forest trailhead like red paint in a mountain stream.
When will the suburbs be the reserves? I wondered.
Dressed in feathered suits of whites, reds, and blues like those of the birds we had just seen, a pair of imaginary quetzals took flight in my mind as I daydreamed by the trailhead. Flying over a suburban neighborhood mottled with cul-de-sacs and browning yards of sod, the birds stare wide-eyed with beaks agape at the strangeness that peels away below them. With the tip of his feather, the male signals to the female. “Look down there,” he chirps. “There’s one trying to make its grass look as green as a palm leaf! How curious!” A few minutes of flight pass. The female chirps up, “Oh, oh! Look there, to the right! Another one is trying to trap a tree in a pot inside its house!”
Above: One of the six or seven different species of hummingbird we spotted at the feeders in front of the gift shop in Monteverde.
