It's TOO Hot to Hike! Reading "Tropical Nature"

It’s hot. Too hot to go outside. The sun rays come straight down and burn and dry out everything. It feels like Guanacaste and, since Tigre is nearly 900meters above sea level, that means Guanacaste must be blistering hot right now. Actually, the outside Temperature Gauge says it’s just 88F, but the tropical sun this time of year makes it feel hotter. It amazes me how people come to Costa Rican beaches and just lounge about out in full sun, lazily roasting and broiling away. Many return home with burns they will never forget. I know a few of them. Once took a young, healthy hiker from NYC to the hospital for heat stroke. Slathering on a ton of sunscreen staves off the burn but makes you swelter even more! I try to stay inside and only venture out early mornings or after 4PM.

Friends up north just snort and say, ‘Oh sure! Poor you! Up here in Michigan today, we’re getting an arctic blast with wind chill temps at 35 below!’

Perhaps that explains why they prostate themselves under the tropical sun when they visit! Paying homage to the great sun God! Very powerful in these parts!

We do have much activity during the dry season. This is the time for cutting new trails, renovating structures and general maintenance. It’s the time for collecting seeds out in the forest. Armando and his workers are of indigenous descent, with dark skin and wiry bodies – it’s rare to even see these guys sweat. They just go out there and work without commenting much on the weather other than to make an oblique reference to it, like: “Feels nice in cool where we’re cutting that trail down there in the forest”.

It’s nice and cool down there all right but when you climb out of the forest into the blazing sun, you still have to hike another 20 minutes up to the stables. This is the time of year for hiking very early or just before sunset.

One major feature of the dry season is that many deciduous trees burst into bloom and are giving us a mouth-dropping show. The forest looks different during the dry season when viewed from overhead, which I do from the balcony of the house. Many trees have dropped leaves, giving them a dramatic, sculptural appearance, which really contrasts with the evergreen trees behind them. Now you can really see the architecture of the massive Guanacaste trees, not to mention the Cedrelas and so many others!

With the flowers, you can point out trees usually well hidden during the leafy rainy season. Found a Poro Poro (Cochlospermum vitifolium, BIXAC) for the first time when it suddenly burst into bright, yellow bloom. Also noted the mimosa white blooms of the Guayaquil, which so many of my botany friends still insist is a Cenizaro. But the petiole gland nailed that one last season and the white flowers confirm it. We’ve learned to accept that trees aren’t what they seem at Tigre.

Maybe I will go take a closer look at it early tomorrow morning. Before it gets too hot. In the meantime, someone gave me a book by Adrian Forsyth & Ken Miyata called “Tropical Nature”, which reads just like having a nice chat with some old friends.

This is just an awesome book for naturalists. Here’s something I didn’t know: Human scat is a highly desired commodity in the forest! It’s the caviar for beetles. As soon as you take a dump in the forest, you stay around and watch the battle that soon ensues as smaller beetles battle for a clump of dung and bigger beetles come in and feast on the eggs and larvae of the smaller beetles. The whole scene is like a huge battle scene straight out of a science fiction movie. According to the authors, the whole thing is over within just a few hours and there is no trace left of the human excrement.

“Tropical Nature” is such a blast to read! Everybody reading this boring blog would just love the style of this book. How do you convey the feeling you get when immersed in the lungs of the earth? The authors really bring it across. The book mostly talks about the lowland forests where the eco-system is so efficient, not much is wasted on the forest ground.

At Tigre, we are at a higher elevation with longer dry season so have a lot more deciduous trees – about 40% mas o menos – so there is a huge leaf drop in the forest soon after it stops raining and the soil gets nicely composted in parts. Great for planting seedlings! But we have to take care while hiking trails thick with leaves. You can’t just strut along kicking up heaps of leaves as you go because you might wake up a sleeping snake. I will write about snakes another time. We have the highly poisonous Fer de Lance (Terciopelo) and also the Coral Snake. We also have many species of non-poisonous. The trick is to understand their habits and instincts and behave accordingly.

We are still camping out at Hotel Tex Mex, where the huge, varnished wood verandahs provide us with much coveted shade during the hottest part of the day. There’s always a nice cool breeze wafting through and the setting is just perfect for doing Chen Taiji forms. If we want something to eat, we wander over to the restaurant where everybody knows us and will cook to our whims.

We don’t know how much longer we will be here but it’s nearly 4pm and time to venture outside.