Santa Elena: Selvatura – Hanging in the Cloud Forest!

The next day was to be our final big day out in the area. When we were first planning our trip we had looked at a lot of the canopy tours which are offered in the cloud forest, most of which have a variety of zip-lines involved. There are plenty of posters advertising who has the longest zip-line or the largest total length of zip-lines and so on. Initially we’d planned on doing one of these but once we came closer to booking and started to do a little more research we found that not all of them would allow Rosa to go on them as she’s only 4 years old. I think that in the end we found a couple who suggested on their website that a 4 year old would be able to take part but it gave us enough time to hesitate and reconsider exactly what we wanted to do. The other thing which most of these places offer is a series of hanging bridges (again competing on length or number of bridges) and with a little time to reflect we felt that we would all probably enjoy more a leisurely walk through the cloud forest rather than a high-speed whizz through the canopy. With all of this in mind we chose to spend a day at Selvatura which not only has a really good offering of hanging bridges but the reviews we read described nicely paved walkways which together with the bridges formed an easily traversable route. It sounded like a very good option for a family with 2 young children.

We arranged to get collected in the morning by our new friend Alvaro and set off for Selvatura. It took a couple of hours in total for us to walk all of the trails and the bridges and it was just right for the 4 of us. We would definitely recommend this tour to a family or to anyone else for that matter and we were really happy to have chosen this over the ziplines. Selvatura is the only one of these walks which is in 100% virgin primary cloud forest which definitely makes it a special experience. On the other hand, we had read that because it is at a higher altitude and thus a little colder that it has less wildlife than some of those at lower altitudes. I think that we found this to be true, spotting little more than other groups of coati as we went around but it didn’t detract from the experience for us.

I’d like to conclude by introducing a thought which occurred to us as a result of our day in the cloud forest but the seed of which had been planted a few days prior during our trip to the ranario. When we were there we met a member of staff who showed us around and helped us to find a few of the smaller frogs. He was asking us about our trip around Costa Rica and how we were enjoying it – something which we’ve found nearly everybody here tends to do with a sort of mixture of curiosity and national pride; it’s like a culturally embodied customer satisfaction survey! We told him how much we were enjoying our time and how we’d found everyone to be so friendly. He responded by saying something like ‘Well if you want to come and live here we have plenty of room for everyone’. I remember that evening discussing it with Rachael – how quick people here seemed to want to share what they have and how it stood in stark contrast to the fear of immigration that is sometimes present back home. Walking around the cloud forest inspired another way to see this mindset. There you have a bewildering and staggering diversity of species. Not just a huge diversity but also an incredible density of species. There are plants growing on plants, growing on plants, growing on vines, growing up trees all around you! In amongst that is a huge diversity and density of insects, birds, mammals, fungi and so on.

Looking at the complexity of our surroundings we discussed how perhaps this kind of environment might feed into this cultural generosity. I think that certainly in England and probably in other parts of Europe too we suffer from a bit of a scarcity mentality – we have so much, such a high standard of living and yet we also have a touch of xenophobia and concerns about other people coming to our country and taking our jobs. We live with an inherited idea that we are competing for resources and that too many people will be a problem. For us experiencing life over here, where people have comparatively far less, it’s striking how willing they are to share. Our thought as we walked through the cloud forest was that maybe being surrounded by ecosystems in which complexity and density are the defining characteristics influences how people think about human ecosystems; that rather than seeing each individual as being in competition for finite resources they see how it is possible to have multiple layers all feeding into an interlinked system and that it is this diversity and complexity which actually gives the system its richness and resilience? It has definitely been our experience of being here that people seem to genuinely embody the sentiment of our saying back home ‘the more, the merrier’.

These same observations apply to the kinds of agriculture that humans have pursued over the past few millenia. In typical agriculture we have come to think in terms of singular crops and within that mindset it is true that each plant will compete for the same resources as its neighbour and so they need to be given space in order to succeed. If we compare this to a wild ecosystem or agroforestry (which attempts to mimic a natural ecosystem) then the reverse becomes true with each species offering something which is of benefit to another species – a climbing plant may offer shade which enables a shade-tolerant species to grow beneath, that shade tolerant plant in turn might attract insects which feed on the larvae of another insect that would otherwise attack another plant in the community and so on. The reality of the connections in such a system are far too complex and interlinked to be put into words.

Letting these thoughts settle as we finished up our morning at Selvatura we made our way to the car park and called Alvaro to come and collect us. As he drove us home we were asking a few questions about how things worked within Santa Elena. I was curious about who owned the various eco-tourism businesses around there – were they owned by members of the community or by people from overseas? Similarly we were interested to know who owned most of the accomodation there. The crux of these questions was getting at where the money from the success of their enterprise was going. Reassuringly, Alvaro told us that most of the eco-tourism ventures there were owned and started by local people. Similarly, he said that for the most part the hotels and airbnb around there were owned by locals. From what he told us it certainly seems like this is something of a success story for eco-tourism. The canopy tours themselves are an example of this; on the one hand they required a small amount of ‘destruction’ to insert pathways, zip-wires, cafeterias and so on into the cloud forest, but over the years that they have been there they have since paid for and given a monetary value to the rainforest. I point out ‘monetary value’ specifically because these eco-systems have all kinds of inherent value which should also be recognised but in our current paradigm it’s necessary to show that they have economic value in order to preserve them.

I found it interesting through our short time there to build a picture of the relatively small and tight-knit community which Alvaro described to us, in the midst of the transient and temporary population of tourists. Zooming out from the picture it’s possible to liken the relatively small compromises such as the infrastructure required to support that tourism industry (those lorries trekking up the mountain every day to stock the shops) in order to allow such a large area of precious rainforest to survive. This had been our busiest stop in Costa Rica with visits to a number of tourist attractions. A bit like the forest which it sits alongside, Santa Elena has a very high density of diverse attractions for anyone who visits.

From Santa Elena we set off on our loop around Lake Arenal. First stop Tronadora…