For the second portion of our trip, we hit up Santa Elena, a small town whose present thriving state is owed almost entirely to ecotourism and the hundreds of square miles of rainforest that bring the ecotourists in. In a rare turn of events, many of the locals are pushing the government to *not* pave the roads to ensure that the town remains difficult to access. Even so, it's clear the town has grown substantially over the last 20 years. It was nice to be in a town with real local residents, supermarkets, and restaurants, instead of in an isolated resort. Our Spanish skills started getting a serious workout.
We went from the cheapest room at a nice hotel to the nicest room at a cheap hotel. It was a lovely bi-level loft with four mattresses and gleaming wood paneling. Over the next couple of days we squeezed in a trip out to a coffee plantation, a walk in the Santa Elena cloudforest, a night rainforest tour in which our guide spotted an astounding number of insects, a zip line tour of the jungle canopy, and the most ridiculously complete and beautiful insect collection I've ever seen.
The cloudforest and insect sightings, both outdoors and in the museum, are already photo-documented in my earlier entries, so I'll focus on the zip lines and the coffee tour.
What I find amusingly ironic about a zipline enterprise is that even though it doesn't really get you close to nature at all, it does a great job of preserving large swaths of rainforest. The whole point of the zipline setup is to get you flying through the treetops in an adrenaline-oriented way. However, given that the zipline operators have over 2 miles of ziplines in a single park, they end up needing a lot of land. Since the experience is meant to deliver *nature*, they end up not developing that land, as well as any other land within a mile or two. Thus, you end up with a profitable enterprise with an incentive to keep the rainforest pristine. The local environmental impact of the ziplining is extremely low... it's just a few metal towers and some maintenance trails, and the whizzing tourists might scare a few birds from time to time, but that's about it.
As for the experience itself, it was quite fun. It gave us some really nice visual perspectives on the rainforest and different canopy levels.
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The coffee plantation tour was an exercise in Spanish skills. All four of us on the tour had some level of SPanish proficiency, so the guide opted to relinquish the role of translator and just let the coffee farmer speak for himself. Getting an induction into the esoteric world of coffee production (it gets as complicated as it does with wine) was interesting, though I was so busy trying to understand all the Spanish that I ended up not being able to think much about the implications of it all. The plantation was small and hit all the eco-buzzwords. In addition to being organic, locally owned etc, it used large fruit trees for shade for the coffee plants, providing a second crop and apparently some other benefits having to do with soil, fertilization, and supporting local wildlife populations.
Apparently light coffee is better than dark coffee because dark coffee comes as a result of roasting at a higher temperature, which obliterates a lot of the variability you get from different species and growing conditions. Light coffee allows you to taste more of the variety in taste that different species and sources of coffee have to offer.
We got to eat coffee beans directly off the plant. They had a sweet flavor on the outside, with a slight hint of coffee. Unroasted beans still had a caffeine kick but a bland and mildly bitter taste.
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