When we approached our sixties, we began to understand why the root meaning of the word travel is “travail.” China, a country we had meant to visit years ago, seemed to be slipping farther and farther out of range, becoming harder and harder to get to. So were Australia and New Zealand, two more on our well-intentioned list of future destinations. Friends our age were beginning to modify their travel plans and go on age-appropriate trips. Cruises were becoming a popular option.
“They have everything on board you could possibly want,” reported a couple who came back from what had been advertised as “the ultimate seven-day cruise.” The ship boasted a nine-hole miniature golf course, a theater, conference rooms, a library, eight different restaurants, including an all-night diner, a jogging track, three swimming pools, a mall, and a fully equipped gym with twenty treadmills—all with an ocean view. It was so ultimate a cruising experience, they said, that you would swear you were on dry land. It was Westport, Connecticut, floating. We couldn’t see the point.
Other friends whose taste in travel was more like our own were signing on for Elderhostel programs and loving them. “They plan everything for you,” they said. “They make all the reservations, and you don’t have to drive or carry your luggage.”
We weren’t ready for the vacation equivalent of assisted living, but we couldn’t help noticing that we were losing some of our youthful get-up-and-go. Ogden Nash was right: “Middle age is when you’re sitting at home on Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you.” We issued audible sighs of relief when we returned to our house at the end of each day. Our favorite destination was turning out to be in bed with a book, our legs intertwined. More and more we were tempted to stay in our own time zone, live in our own home, sleep in our own bed, and not trip over unfamiliar furniture and crack into walls when we needed to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Nevertheless we were determined not to yield to entropy. Before it was too late, we would take our vacations in physically challenging environments and save the easy-to-get-to urban destinations for when we were really old. Afternoon concerts in Saint Martin-in-the-Fields could wait.
To celebrate my sixtieth birthday, we decided we would vacation in the Costa Rican rain forest. Until then, our experience with the jungle had been limited to monkeys at the zoo and toucans on the Froot Loops box. The real jungle, we suspected, wasn’t so tame. We decided against the trip that promised the opportunity to boil our own drinking water and sleep overnight in an open tree house. The boiling water part might have been tolerable. What queered it for me was the prospect of sleeping in an open tree house. Open to what? Monkeys? Snakes? Larry didn’t even bother to argue the point. Instead we chose to stay at a resort, described as “the most deluxe jungle and beach hideaway in Costa Rica.” The oxymoronic pairing of the adjective luxury with the noun jungle appealed to our bipolar travel style.
The resort was more than just a pretty place. It was a “model of sustainable ecotourism,” a demonstration of how to save the rain forest by enticing nature lovers to pay to see it. Could we qualify as ecotourists? We can’t identify anything beyond the generic—tree, rock, bird, bug, vine. We have never counted birds. We are, however, very good about recycling newspapers and anything plastic with a 1 or a 2 on the bottom.
Upon our arrival we were instructed in the ways of living in harmony with the jungle. One rule made a particular impression on me: Don’t kill or scream at anything. This meant that if I were soaping up in the outdoor shower and I looked up and saw a monkey hanging from the shower rod, grinning at me, I should smile back. Or if I were to find a beetle the size of a hamburger with many, many legs in my room, I should scoop it up gently and place it outdoors. Actually, I did find such a beetle making his way strenuously across the bedroom floor, and I did ask Larry to “take it out.” Unfortunately he watches a lot of Clint Eastwood movies and almost “took it out” by squashing it under his sneaker. I reminded him just in time that we were ecotourists.
A guided tour of the jungle has much to teach the neoecotourist. First of all, it really is a jungle out there. People actually do hack their way through the underbrush with machetes, sleep under mosquito netting, and get bitten by scorpions. The jungle truly is unimaginably hot and humid. Remember how Sidney Greenstreet and Ava Gardner used to sweat in spite of the overhead fans? Even Tarzan had problems acclimating to jungle life. Had I given the matter sufficient thought, I might have realized that eight degrees from the equator in the middle of a Costa Rican rain forest might not be the optimum vacation destination for a redheaded Caucasian, especially one whose ancestors actually did come from the Caucasus, just outside of Kiev. I might also have figured out that every day is a bad hair day in Costa Rica unless you’re Costa Rican.
I learned many lessons from the jungle. For instance, it is very unlikely that Tarzan could have swung from vines, since most are only looped over branches. Also, it is difficult to tell a root from a snake until you’ve tripped over it, and howler monkeys sound like hound dogs. A butterfly seldom lives longer than three months, and unless you want to further shorten its life, don’t pick it up by its wings. Better you should grab it out of thin air by the thorax. And lastly, it is very muddy underfoot and quite humiliating to slide on your butt past the other eco-tourists on the trail—hearty honeymooners Robin and Hal from Denver, a holistic optometrist from Park Slope, and Larry.
Another important lesson I learned from the jungle is that it’s very nice to be at the top of the food chain. For instance, I am glad that I am not a leaf cutter ant, the insect that gets my vote for the lower species most in need of an intellectual, evolutionary upgrade. Stop to mop your brow at almost any step along the jungle trail, look down, and you will notice what appears to be an endless, slow-moving line of small ants, each bearing a hunk of leaf many times the size of its body. We followed one such line of tiny trudgers for at least a kilometer through the jungle to their destination—a hole in the ground. We observed each of the bearer ants disappearing into the same hole in the ground to deposit its bit of leaf and then heading back in the opposite direction to get another. While my ecotourist companions marveled at the sheer determination of these tiny creatures, I indulged in ecologically incorrect fantasies, such as imagining what would happen if I pushed a stick into the hole. I also wondered as I stood there watching this labor of lug, why, after all these eons, the ants hadn’t realized that if they reorganized as a bucket brigade they could deliver more leaf bits faster, thereby freeing up some leisure time in which they could go to the gym, rent a video, or contemplate the meaning of life.
After three hours in the jungle, I had seen, in addition to lots of ants, two black widow spiders, one set of jaguar prints, a gang of spider monkeys swinging high above, and the bottom half of a three-toed mother sloth hanging in a tree—all through binoculars. Another thing ecotourists should know is that any species you see in the jungle you can see much closer up on TV. Of course, you won’t be seeing them in their natural habitat. On the other hand, you will be in yours.
My natural habitat turned out to be my bungalow, where I would lie in bed reading, sipping a mango daiquiri, cooled by a ceiling fan, under a canopy of mosquito netting. When I wasn’t in bed, I was cooling off in the pool or eating well in the dining room. After day one, I opted out of the eco part of ecotourism. Me no Jane.
Larry of the Jungle—formerly Sir Lawrence of Suburbia—was too alpha-male to give up so quickly. He plunged back into the jungle the next day for the medicine walk, led by the local shaman. Larry staggered out three hours later, and after emptying his boots, showering, and taking three ibuprofen, he crawled in alongside me, under the mosquito netting.
“The shaman called me ‘old white man,’” he said before slipping into an exhausted sleep.
Saint Martin-in-the-Fields was beginning to look good.