Biologist, naturalist, and ecologist E O Wilson wrote, “We should preserve every scrap of biodiversity as priceless while we learn to use it and come to understand what it means to humanity. Biodiversity can’t be maintained by protecting a few species in a zoo, or by preserving greenbelts or national parks. To function properly, nature needs more room than that. “
I decided to celebrate turning 70 in Costa Rica on the trip with Overseas Adventure Travel called Costa Rica’s Natural Parks. As it turned out, I celebrated so much more of what our world has to offer as I saw such a variety of wildlife in that unique part of the world. Every day on the trip was a celebration of nature’s biodiversity, from the different ecological parts of the country, to a rainforest. a cloud forest, driving through elevation as high as 11,000 feet in the mountains, and ultimately the shores of the Pacific and the Caribbean. But within those different ecological environments was a biodiversity as well of indigenous plants and wildlife which made every day richer. Who knew that leaf carrying ants and the red eye leaf frog would become tiny but important highlights on the trip? And I saw both on my birthday.
Hiking in solitude in the various forests such as Monteverde Cloud Forest or Manual Antonio National Park, and riding along rivers such as the Rio Frio near the Nicaraguan border in a small town called Los Chilies, gave me such a sense of peace. I knew very little about leaf cutting ants. But upon learning there were 47 varieties of them and how they contributed to nature including creating a nutritional fungus in the forest by carrying twenty times their body weight, we stepped over them carefully so as not to disturb nature’s work.
The actual day of my birthday I went on a night walk through the rainforest. We mostly saw insects, but at the very end we were treated to the sight of the nocturnal red eyed leaf frog. It was so tiny we almost missed it, but they congregate near water, so our guide knew where to look. We even saw birds asleep on the branches at night. The big catch in birding however, was seeing the Resplendent Quetzal in San Gerardo de Dota near the end of the trip. T
Among the multitude of creatures we saw and experienced were some beautiful land crabs, a few sloths, a number of lizards, iguana, and a whole troupe of monkeys who put on quite a playful show around the end of one hike On one boat ride, we enjoyed the presence of crocodiles, cormorants, egrets, hornbills, and even a whole “bird tree” which remained our companions for this delightful ride.
Nature seems to have taken away my vanity. I started out each day by preparing myself each morning as I normally would. By the end of the day, between unexpected tropical showers, breezes from being on the lake, to the even gustier weather of the colder cloud forest, my unkept hair, frazzled by rainforest mist on top of everything else, reminded me that this experience wasn’t about me. It was about my interaction with my natural surroundings, and how that molds and changes us. What my hair looked like made me realize that was just one manifestation of the effects of being in nature. Hiking in solitude even among a group of travelers I had more inward experiences and revelations than expected. Ernest Hemingway always wrote about man against the forces of nature, and nature always won. But I learned on this trip that we can learn life’s lessons along the way during these beautiful interactions. In the end, nature is our greatest teacher.
All Photos by Jann Segal
Travel the World with Passion 