The last 18 miles of the road leading to the Monteverde Cloud Forest in Costa Rica, full of ruts and potholes by design, takes over an hour and a half to navigate. The locals like it that way. And they choose not to fix it because it would be too easy then for tourists to visit.

That may not sound all that hospitable but it illustrates the emphasis Costa Ricans place on conservation. And the Cloud Forest, which I visited prior to Covid as part of an Overseas Adventure Travel tour of Costa Rica, is indeed an ecological marvel worth saving – and seeing. But you have to really want to go there!

So what exactly is a cloud forest? Well, contrary to popular thinking, it is not where all your technological apps are stored. It is, instead, a rare kind of rain forest where plants actually grow ON TOP of trees.  The technical explanation is that “the combination of altitude, humidity and irregular topography creates a unique environmental situation where the clouds remain low for most of the year, preventing the advent of sun, locking in moisture, and creating an atmosphere where plant activity is so high that they actually cover the trees.” The non-technical explanation? Lots of clouds and rain result in every inch of the trees from bark to branch to be covered by things green and growing. These epiphytes, as the plants which grow on trees are called, cover every branch and limb, creating a dense wonderland of greenery. Fifty percent of all the vegetation in the cloud forest lives on the tops of trees.

Now I’ve been in many a rain forest before but never one so overwhelmingly green and lush, a blanket of emerald and jade and olive and lime, unrelenting and opaque. There are no empty branches, tree trunks or ground area so that the immersion in this sea of green is utterly complete. Each branch, bush, leaf is so unique in its color, design, texture, size, shape  and sheen as to more resemble an art form than a  mere fragment of foliage, in which Ellen Kaiden of Sarasota, Florida, the artist in the group, claimed to detect different emotions. “I was overwhelmed by the life force of the Costa Rican Cloud Forest. We were privileged guests in an alternative universe of the canopy. It was pure magic,” she noted.

Although our guide, Andres Herrera González, spent three hours discussing the ecological and biological implications of every plant, I was perfectly content to just let myself be absorbed into the visual immensity of my green-laden surroundings.

Equally important to the expansive plant life is the multiplicity of animal life living among it. This enormously rich ecosystem supports 7% of the world’s plant and animal diversity in only 0.1% of the earth’s surface. It’s an amazing place but was only one of several rain and tropical forests, as well as beaches, villages and farms, we visited as part of OAT’s 12-day Costa Rican adventure.

And as important as the actual itinerary may be, what sets OAT apart from many other tour companies is its emphasis on Learning and Discovery, a part of the OAT philosophy that the company takes very seriously. And with a guide like Andres, a mere botanist with two Master’s degrees in ecotourism and sustainability, it was hard not to be learning all the time. Woven into the formal activities are opportunities to learn about the people, explore local markets and towns and participate in cultural exchanges.

But what happens outside that itinerary is equally interesting. The rides from place to place can be long but not boring. Perhaps you stop for lunch and get as dessert an unexpected exhibition of resident show horses belonging to the owner of the restaurant. A bathroom break brings a surprise demonstration of sugar cane extraction in an old mill. The fact that they mixed the resulting samples with local Costa Rican rum made the experience all the more special.

Add to that a photo op of a volcano in which our eagle-eyed leader spotted a sloth in a nearby tree or a random opportunity to milk a cow at a local farm and the stops not included on the itinerary compete with those which are for excitement. And the time actually in the bus is consumed with lectures on history, geology, culture, political corruption and other controversial topics all surrounding the Costa Rican experience.

Meanwhile, back at the Cloud Forest, there was quite a bit of local color to break up the monotony of greenness. Time was spent seeking out – and reveling in – the unusual Resplendant Quetzel, a large rare and beautiful brightly colored bird that is as elusive in Costa Rica as the kiwi is in New Zealand. Traversing a series of hanging bridges provided a birds-eye view of the forest very different than that from the ground. Zip-lining across the tops of multiple trees ensured an experience in which the adrenaline rush clearly topped environmental appreciation – at least for the moment, and a visit to a hummingbird sanctuary where hundreds of the colorful little guys flapped their little wings with impossible-to-measure speed  entranced tourists who desperately tried to capture them on camera and cell phone.

A meeting  with Martha Campbell, the daughter of one of the original Quaker settlers of Monteverde in 1951, provided some historical context to the Cloud Forest community, which at that time had no plumbing, no electricity, no phone service and very few people. Though the community survived by cattle ranching initially, eventually the Quaker community discovered that a far greater good – as well as more money – could be accomplished thru conservation and the expanded tourism trade that followed.

Still she somewhat bemoans the large influx of tourists of the past two decades: “I wish there would be less development. Sure there are more job opportunities, but also more cars, maybe more crime and I just miss the simple life we used to have.” I would hazard a guess that the road leading to the Monteverde Cloud Forest isn’t going to be fixed anytime soon…

Visit Overseas Adventure Travel’s website for more information about traveling to Costa Rica. Trips are expected to resume late summer, with all the necessary CDC protocols practiced to maintain safety throughout the adventure.

The post Monteverde Cloud Forest: A Costa Rican Tourist Attraction that Discourages Tourists appeared first on Traveling Archive.

Ecuador ranks 25th in the list of Covid-related deaths per capita per nation, according to the Johns Hopkins University. But my friends here in Mindo doubt this statistic. “The death rates are much higher,” they insist. “Look at all the coffins outside the hospitals. There are so many uncounted deaths.”

A few months ago, I nervously watched two coffins borne past the town plaza and into the local church. “Oh, no!” I thought. “The virus has finally invaded this remote pueblo!”

I asked a friend about them. “Not Covid,” he assured me. “They were driving drunk on a motorcycle.” He shrugged. “These days, what else is there to do? There are no jobs.”

My friend is a chef in Mindo. Locals know him as Signor Crab because he sautés crabs in coconut milk and spices, in the style of his coastal village. Before the pandemic, we barely had time to talk because he was too busy serving his signature dish to tourists visiting the pueblo. Nowadays, I see him sitting alone in Mindo’s formerly bustling, now silent, plaza. Without a job, Signor Crab asked me if he could cook for me in exchange for money. He told me he needed to buy medicine for his two sons.

I am in Mindo to study the cloud forests around me. Each cloud forest is a unique habitat, a home to scores of plant and animal species that are found only in Mindo. Over eons, these forests formed when the Pacific Ocean’s warm vapors wafted against the cooling Andes peaks, creating the ideal environment for orchids, bromeliads, and ferns. These mountains are home to Guadua Augustoflora, the South American bamboo that, with greater efficiency than most plants, sucks carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converts it into material used to build local houses.

Before leaving the United States, I worked on environmental, computational models. Now, I use Artificial Intelligence and satellite images to track tree cover loss in these forests. My studies suggest that in the past two years, in a place about a third the size of Washington, DC, Mindo lost tree cover in an area equivalent to more than 3000 tennis courts (Tracking Cloud Forests With Cloud Technology and Random Forests).

These trees are victims of the perfect storm brewed by joblessness, poverty, record gold prices, Covid, and climate change. The desperate poor hunt for gold in illegal, artisanal mines. The rich raze forests to build country homes to escape Quito, Ecuador’s congested capital, where infection rates are at an all-time high. Beyond these immediate threats, climate change insidiously destroys Mindo’s ecosystem. With warmer temperatures, the clouds to which the trees have adapted over thousands of years are dissipating.

The same week I witnessed the funeral of the two victims of the motorcycle accident, the International Panel for Climate Change issued its report, referred to by the United Nations’ Secretary General as a “code red for humanity.” Destroying the Andes cloud forests amounts to a negative, feed-back loop: the forests around me can potentially buffer the world against the effects of greenhouse gases; but they are being destroyed partially because climate change is wreaking havoc on local farms that must contend with dramatic, climactic changes.

At the end of each day, I watch the clouds drift down from the heavens to rest upon Mindo. They are like feathery intimations of hope. As long as the clouds persist, so too will the forest ecosystem.

Similarly, I see hope in the stoic persistence of Signor Crab and of my other friends on Mindo’s streets: the shopkeepers; the Venezuelan refugees; the artisans and buskers. They stake their lives on ecotourism. They know that without the trees, the tourists will not return if and when the world regains some version of normalcy after the pandemic.

Stubbornly, I make the deliberate choice to cling to hope. On Tuesdays, I muster hope by teaching data science and Artificial Intelligence to a small group of students. They are graduates of Mindo’s school for at-risk families. All of them are healing-from poverty’s ills; from familial instability; from domestic abuse; from the violence of classism, racism, colonialism, and sexism.

My ambitious students are my heroes. With each backpacking, laptop-toting tourist they see in Mindo, my students are reminded that opportunities exist beyond their threatened mountains. They talk about this as they type their code and run their algorithms, using my project to monitor deforestation as an example of Artificial Intelligence’s power. They muse that perhaps in the future, they might conquer the virtual, data-intensive world of rich nations, in the way their ancestors’ lands were once conquered by white Europeans.

My students dream of the future. They want to conduct non-extractive, profitable, sustainable work. They want to produce knowledge-based goods and services for the world. My students-who have lived their entire lives among the marginalized and the discarded-long to conduct creative, intellectually challenging work…while being nestled within Creation’s embrace…while being nurtured by the Divine work unfolding among the clouds.

For more on Mindo, Ecuador, read Mr. Pasky Pascual’s scientific journal of Life in Mindo, Ecuador.

The post In the Andes Mountains: The Grand, Silent Victims of Climate Change and Covid appeared first on Traveling Archive.

Dozens of millions of years ago (mas o menos), at the bottom of the western Pacific Ocean, the Nazca plate insinuated itself under the South American continent and began to drift east at the rate of 80 millimeters a year. The continent began to buckle upwards, in the same way a yogi’s mat buckles up when the yogi pulls hands toward feet during her downward dog.

Over eons, all that buckling produced the Andes Cordilleras, the world’s longest continental mountain range. It spans much of South America, from Venezuela to Argentina.

I live on the northern end of the Andes, in a tiny pueblo called Mindo, one of the world’s hotspots for endemic biodiversity. That is, much of the animal and plant life surrounding me evolved here and cannot be found anywhere else. Mindo is completely surrounded by cloud forests. Over time, when warm water vapor from the Pacific hit up against the cool Andes mountains, clouds formed. Mindo became a perfect spot for epiphytes-plants like moss, fern, orchids, and bromeliad that have evolved the ability to pull moisture out of the atmosphere.

Orchids grow wild on the trees that line the road leading up to the cascades in the mountains. As one walks up this road, one is invariably startled by blurred flashes of orange, blue, yellow, and red feathers. Based on my study, there are more than 300 species of birds in Mindo’s forests, an area about one third the size of Washington, DC.

Despite its small size, Mindo is host to an eclectic group of individuals. People from all over the world live here, including those who migrated from Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Germany, Canada, the U.S., Poland, and France.

Without a doubt, most people from North America and Europe visit Mindo because they read that it is one of the world’s top sites of biodiversity for bird species.

This includes a wide variety of hummingbirds and a species of Andean cock-in-the-rocks found only in Mindo.

The central role that ecotourism plays in Mindo can be observed in the pueblo’s central plaza. In the plaza, you can see the stone statue of a hummingbird. Sitting on one of the benches, you can look around and see the famed cloud forests of Mindo in the mountains around you.

If, after sitting a while in the plaza, you begin to crave some of the local food, there is no shortage of food choices around you.

For example, Gladys will happily serve you a delicious mix of grilled chorizo (sausage), chicken, pork, and octopus.

Or perhaps, you would prefer pizza prepared in a brick oven? Antonio can help you out.

Maybe your tastes run toward vegetarian or vegan? In that case, swing by Mechi’s place. Mechi serves these dishes using quinoa and other local vegetables, cooked in the style of her native coastal village. You’ll find her family helping her out.

After lunch, you’ll probably want some desert. Flor’s yogurt ice-cream place is just across from the plaza. Many tourists and digital nomads come here to have ice cream, drink coffee, or down some artisanal beer while they engage in people watching.

You may now feel like walking off some of those calories. Along Mindo’s streets, you’ll find artists from all of South America-from Colombia, Venezuela, Peru-showing off the art that they’ve made.

If you decide to stay a while, you’ll soon discover the charming community and landscape that have prompted people from all over the world to make Mindo a place they call “home.”

On weekends, you’ll see indigenous farmers from around the town who drive in to Mindo to sell their produce.

You’ll meet people like the two sisters who left their home in Venezuela and who have carved out a new life in Mindo selling arepas, cornmeal cakes filled with beans, avocado, spices, and optionally, meat. Their small restaurant is beside a river lined with flowers and fruit trees; as you wait for your meal, you can keep your camera ready for the birds that hover by.

Mindo’s beauty has attracted an international community, including Edyta, an artist who has lived and worked in Europe, the United States, and all over South America.

If you choose to visit Mindo, you’ll find a place that abounds with nature, art, music, and a feeling of community.

The post Life in Mindo, Ecuador appeared first on Traveling Archive.