I woke up Saturday morning and sat in bed watching my now familiar group of hummingbirds going about their business in the flowery bush outside my window. Howler monkeys howling off in the distance and all of our bird symphony doing it's thing. Thhis was the last morning in the Casa Encantada.
We packed up and set our bags out before we drove to Sky Trek further down the road. This was our day to have a guided tour of the local rainforest on a jungle path with hanging bridges across the higher levels of the forest canopy.
I'm not sure what we all had in our minds about this, but my pre-formed image of this adventure consisted of a gentle stroll over a few high-set gently hanging bridges. I hadn't seen any brochures or heard further about this experience.
We quickly found that this was not a gentle 30 minute stroll ... but a 3 hour hike up and down the rainforest paths and along high bridges. It was undoubtedly a gorgeous walk, and we learned a lot about the rainforest vegetation.
However, the kids were not as impressed. They hadn't expected a 3 hour trek and, after the first hour, began complaining constantly for the duration of the hike. It was too long. They were dying of thirst. There were no animals visible. They had to pee. To top it off, our guide was the least enthusiastic and charismatic of any we'd had thus far.
OK, not a great start. But all of us (well, with the exception of the youngest two) agreed later that it had been reasonably interesting. While our guide was not able to point out any living non-vegetative life other than an ant, she was able to tell us some interesting tidbits about the trees and plants.
To start with, we hadn't realise that there are 4 kinds of rainforests in Costa Rica. The one we are in is a 'tropical rain forest'. There are also cloud forests like the Montverde Cloud Forest. The tropical rainforest is obviously the wettest, but also the coolest of the rain forests. And the rain forests are broken into primary and secondary froest growth - the primary being the stereotyically tall trees seen in photos and the secondary being the newer, lower growing, jungle style growth.
Our guide showed us one of the most common trees in the area: the trumpet trees. They are hollow inside and very tall - growing at the rapid pace of 3 meters per year until they 'die' around 25 years. Their distinctive long trunk-like roots are visible for a few feet above the surface of the ground before they join up into the tree trunk. This tree has a symbiotic relationship with a species of leaf cutter ants, providing a home for them in the hollows and good in the stems of large leaves.
Another interesting tree is the Stranglefig (also known as Banyan) tree. We see may of these here and they are typically huge. The strangling fig is actually a series of vines that grow up around another, establised large tree and suffocate the primary tree, using it's structure to grow a new outer trunk out of the vines that have grown into trunks surrounding the original tree. These are very beautiful trees, very wide and tall with intricately inter-winding trunk lengths.
We aso investigated the rattlensake plant, marantasia. WIth flower stems that appear as large rattlesnake rattles, this plant is often home to snakes that hide in it to await small creatures coming to drink water from the beautiful rattle shaped flower stems.
We looked around at the 'Heart of Pam' trees that grow high alongside the hanging bridges. Parts of the trunk are harvested for sale as an exotic food. Because of this, it has been made illegal to cut down wild Heart of Palm trees and they must now be farmed in order to produce product for sale.
We finally finished off our jungle trek through the paths of this privately owned 250 square km section of rainforest by stopping off at the butterfy conservatory at the end of the trail. Phew! It was a long mornings' hike and not only the children were tired!
No comments:
Post a Comment