Joanna Biggar's Blog

Domingo.

What to do on a Sunday when you’ve walked for miles on Saturday and had to resort to resting your swollen legs while cramming your swollen head with Spanish verbs?

Walk some more.

This time it was preplanned and “turistico,” but oh so wonderful. At 7-something we piled into a tacky van with ads all over it so you couldn’t see out the windows and bumped our way up more unpaved, rocky roads to the Santa Elena Reserve so that we could walk in the forest canopy.

Instead of walking on the forest floor, looking up, we walked among the treetops, looking down. There were stretches of trail along the ground, then stretches of suspension bridges high over everything, including the sounds of rushing water below that for the most part was invisible. The other sounds were amazing bird calls, some seeming close enough to touch, but the birds remained mostly out of sight too. The trees were huge, with some ferns big enough to house a whole family beneath their fronds; the trees and air seemed filled, too, with creepers, vines, things that appear to grow in the air, and everywhere the world was green in a hundred shades of variation. There were flowers, too, but they seemed to come out sparingly and were usually bright red.

      Not being a botanist, and not even knowing the names of the plants we were seeing, I feel inadequate to describe what is clearly a different world, in the forest canopy, and one of the most exotic and moving I’ve visited.

   It was worth the annoyances of having to be that loathsome thing, a tourist, and having to endure others of the same annoying species. It was worth the bumpy roads, broken parts of the trails and bridges that made walking very hard. It was even worth the screams of the crazy zip-liners who were flying around where we were walking.

I’m thinking of trying that next.