Contrasting temperate with tropic
Steven Foster – Eureka Springs today. Costa Rica yesterday. This time of year the contrast is not quite as dramatic as one might think. I almost regretted leaving at this time of year when the Ozarks display a thousand shades of green, but the canopy of the Costa Rica rainforest also flashed greens of every possibility. Far underneath our feet in the Ozarks are the geological remnants of a three-billion-year-old volcanic substrate. In Costa Rica, the ever-present volcanic experience reminds one of human smallness, like microorganisms at the base of a skin blemish.
No ticks or chiggers were to be seen in Costa Rica, but one still had to be aware of every manner of biting and stinging creatures such as Paraponera clavata, the bullet ant which delivers the most dramatically painful experience of any stinging insect. We carefully avoided one another.
Second on the list of insects offering a painful wallop are tarantula wasps. Given their length of more than two inches, they are also known as tarantula hawks. No, they don’t look like tarantulas, they eat them for lunch. I experienced a fly-by or two of the blue-black giants with rust-colored wings, but we, too, avoided contact.
And of course, just like in the Ozarks, one wants to keep a keen eye on the ground (or in the trees) for well-camouflaged pit vipers. Our highly-evolved pit vipers, including rattlesnakes and cottonmouths, have sophisticated warning mechanisms. In the tropics, the pit vipers offer no such warning. Most tourist venues no longer allow open-toed shoes along trails. Seldom seen here or there in day-to-day activities, venomous critters, no matter where one lives, always seem to become a topic of conversation.
Like Eureka Springs, Costa Rica is dependent upon and serves the tourist. Unlike Eureka Springs, most of those who work in Costa Rica’s tourist industry have not themselves ever been tourists or traveled abroad. Costa Rica has carefully developed its image of a friendly location for ecotourism. Nature, itself, is the attraction. We can learn from that. Returning home to the beauty of an Ozark spring also reminds me of how fortunate we are to live in natural beauty. Sure, Costa Rica has more plants species, more birds, more bugs, and more beaches. We only need turn our attention to the beauty in front of our eyes to appreciate home as a destination.