Sustainability and the Environment: "You Are a Tourist"

I bet you're going, "Whoa, hey, what happened? Did these adventurers fall into a hole and vanish or something?" Well just calm down, it's going to be fine. The adventurers didn't fall into any holes, they've just been super busy working on their internships, which you're going to hear all about in just a few days. But it's not time to hear about those yet; right now it's time to hear about this awesome thing called Tourism Day!

While you read this post about tourism, here's a Death Cab for Cutie song about you being a tourist that you could play in the background while you read about it: 

Tourism Day is this whole big day designed to make the adventurers really think about the economy of tourism and the effects that it can have on the country, its people, and the natural environment. The adventurers decided that in order to really think about tourism, they had to think like tourists, so they put on their bucket hats and their big tall socks and neglected their sunscreen and went out to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, which receives up to 75,000 visitors per year, holy goodness. 

Now the first thing that you have to do on any tourism day is to take a quiz. So that's the first thing that they did. 

Chandler just doesn't get the concept of "Hey Chandler, act natural."

Well after they'd all aced their tourism quiz, they listened to a brief but awesome lecture on the different types of tourism in CR, and then they headed out into the reserve. Their assignment was to meander around all the different trails, check out the visitor center and gift shop, and come up with some opinions on the reserve's efforts to operate in a sustainable fashion.

As soon as they took two steps into the reserve, they immediately ran into a guide who was using his spotting scope to show people a sloth hanging out way up there in the trees above the gift shop. How cool. This little encounter definitely made the adventurers think about how much wildlife there was in and around the reserve, and then they decided to get all suspicious and wonder if the folks at the reserve were maybe trying to lure the sloth to hang out up there so that people could see it as soon as they walked in. Probably not, but you have to think about these sorts of things if you're going to be a sustainability detective, you know?

Emma, Rachel, and Channy go to see a man about a sloth 

All of the adventurers spread out into the different corners of the giant reserve, and Rachel, Emma, and Eilish decided to go looking for Quetzals; since the photographer didn't have any good pictures of Quetzals yet, the photographer went along with Rachel, Emma, and Eilish. 

Emma's stoked to be out and about instead of trapped inside some classroom in Iowa 

As this little crew was meandering along, they ran into this giant tree, and of course their first instincts were super on-point.

Here's Eilish wasting no time doing what needs to be done 

It didn't take too long for the photographer and the rest of the crew to follow Eilish's example 

After that little group was finished testing the tree to see how strong and sustainable it was, they dusted themselves off and headed down the path a little farther, where they ran into another small band of adventurers roaming around the wilds of the reserve.

Leah looks lost and Morgan looks like she stole Dan's lunch 

The adventurers made their way through the thick forest, finally emerging onto a giant sky-bridge that was made of nice durable steel, so don't worry parents, they definitely didn't fall. 

 The adventurers stick their faces way over the edge, which seems to be a thing they love to do 

A not-so-sustainable styrofoam cup that somebody left on the bridge capacity sign 

This little coffee cup they found got all the adventurers thinking. The cup was there because there weren't a lot of trash receptacles around, so at first they though that the reserve should have more trash cans around the trails. But then they started wondering if they really wanted to be smelling garbage while they were walking around the rainforest, and as soon as they wondered that, they realised they didn't. And besides, trash cans might attract a lot of animals who like to root around in the trash, altering their diet and disrupting their natural behaviour.

Maybe a better tactic would be to just have people be personally responsible and carry out whatever they bring in, or maybe don't bring styrofoam coffee cups in at all. Kind of parallels the whole "reduce consumption, don't produce more energy" idea, doesn't it?

Well the adventurers couldn't stand around there all day wondering how to prevent the sudden appearance of coffee cups inside the reserve, so they just grabbed the little cup and headed deeper into the forest, intent on unlocking the mysteries of sustainability. 

They noticed that all of the footpaths in here were made out of little concrete blocks, most likely to prevent erosion during the wet season. It was kind of a bummer, because it sorta shattered the illusion that the adventurers were deep deep in the jungle where nobody would ever find them, but they understood that it was probably necessary to preserve the environment. There's another interesting point: places like the reserve are forced to balance catering to tourist's desires with the preservation of the place that all the tourists are coming to see. After all, it's not the tourists' home-- it's the animals' home, man. 

Further up and further in 

Finally, after much exploration, the adventurers made it up to the continental divide. On one side, the land fell away to the Pacific coast, which they had explored on their first field trip into the gulf. On the other side lay the Caribbean, which they were soon to venture into in only a few more weeks.  

The mountains are a line in the sky-- radar love 

Here, all the adventurers rendezvoused for lunch with a view, and they told each other stories of all the awesome creatures they had seen along their journeys. Hector and Sam told the photographer about this awesome Quetzal they had seen, which really ground the photographer's gears, since he hadn't seen one yet.

Look how happy these adventurers are. Aren't you happy, parents, that you let them come to Costa Rica? 

The beautiful Caribbean slope

 Once they'd had their tasty lunch, the adventurers packed their things and started heading back down the mountain. They had a discussion at 2pm, which gave them just a little bit more time to mosey around and try to find those Quetzals. And guess what the photographer found? A Quetzal. 

He's basically a dinosaur, you know? Just look at him ugh. 

Don't tell him we're looking at him 

Quetzals are one of the birds that 80-year-old birders come here from all over the world to see, and they're definitely pretty cool. More than being pretty cool, Monteverde's tourism economy pretty much relies on them for its survival. If the Quetzals go away, the tourists go away, which is why you capitalise the Q in Quetzal just like the G in God. 

Well they finally emerged from the forest, having learned much and changed and grown and all that good stuff, and a couple of the adventurers decided to go and investigate the gift shop, just to really get inside the head of a tourist. 

Classic Chandler, what a tourist 

 After all their browsing and touring, the adventurers finally made it back to their little classroom, where they had a nice wrap-up discussion. They talked about all of the things they saw in the reserve that made it sustainable, and they talked about some of the things they saw that made it unsustainable. 

Here's Aislyn making a good point

The adventurers also talked about the idea of tourism as a whole, and the effect that it has on the natural places of the world.  They talked about how much a place can change once the masses discover it, kind of like Weezer, and the ways that you can try to avoid killing the things you love. 

All in all, the adventurers left the reserve as optimists; it was easy to get bummed out about all the hidden places in the world getting equipped with handrails and hotels, but they took solace in the fact that there were people just like them working every day to make sure that a few of the wild places outlast our handprints on the planet.

Enter again the sweet forest