Eco Logic

OROTINO, Costa Rica — Her jungle cry was more of a whimper, a meek and trembling “Ooohhh Mmmyyy GODDDDD!!!” as she stepped out of the towering tree and soared over the forest floor, surprising even herself by landing softly in the branches of another tree, about 150 feet away.

“I really wasn’t expecting it to be like this,” she said after catching her breath, the color slowly returning to her face. “I thought it’d be a lot more casual.”

A walk in the park this was not.

But Sarah Champ, a nurse from Alberta, Canada, handled herself admirably enough in the role of Jane, the only woman on a wild tour of the rain forest with her husband and two other men, whose fear could be measured by the death grips they had on the cables holding their small, wooden platform high on the trunk of a giant Guanacaste tree.

Across the way was another tree and another platform. Connecting the platforms was a rope and between the two trees, 70 feet below, were gurgling creeks and muddy trails, which each of these adventurers would have loved to be trudging through about now.

“The sooner we get back onto terra firma, the better,” one of them remarked. To which another responded, “Yeah, the more firma, the less terror.”

It’s an old joke, but it took the edge off, and Champ, her husband Lyall and fellow Canadians Peter and Derek Brown went swinging merrily--though precariously-- from tree to tree, ultimately rappelling back down to good old ground.

It was there that the journey was deemed both exciting and exhilarating, a resounding success that made them all hungry enough to eat a lizard.

OK, so a day in the jungle does not turn a person into a total savage. They cooked their lizards first.

And, yes, they tasted a bit like chicken.

IGUANA PARK

Iguana Park, a 92-acre parcel of rain forest just south of this small agricultural community in west-central Costa Rica, is the site of one of five canopy tours developed by Darren Rennick, founder of the Original Canopy Tour who pioneered and patented the use of pulleys and horizontal traverse cables as a means of transportation through the treetops.

As the name implies, the park--in a tropical transition area between dry lowland forests to the north and wet rain forests to the south--is crawling with green iguanas.

The prehistoric-looking lizards, an endangered species, are raised here, released here, hunted here on a limited basis and even eaten here.

In fact, the small outdoor cafe just inside the park is one of only a few places in Costa Rica where iguana is legally served (a few of the bigger hotels are permitted to put it on their menus, and do so mostly as a novelty).

At Iguana Park, you can get your iguana between buns as a burger or wrapped in tortillas as tacos or burritos. You can have your iguana smothered in tomato sauce or mixed with scrambled eggs.

The chef does a good job of masking the flesh with other ingredients, which is probably good because eating iguana does take getting used to, especially with all the live iguanas milling about.

“It’s pretty good,” Champ said of her taco, not convincing anyone. “It’s OK,” said her husband, an equally poor actor.

Surely it’s an acquired taste. Costa Ricans in rural areas are very partial to iguana meat, and might point out that it’s higher in protein than beef and lower in cholesterol than chicken.

That’s one of the reasons the lizards have taken it on the chin over the years. A bigger reason, though, is that much of their habitat has disappeared, having been bulldozed and turned into grazing land for cattle.

The Pro Iguana Verde Foundation has been trying to reverse this situation and make an example of the docile reptiles, giving them a starring role in an attempt to show that rain forests can produce more than merely the air we need to breathe, which should be reason enough to save them.

The concept is called sustainable development. In essence, the farmers, or campesinos, who cut down the forest here and have poached iguanas in the past, have restored the forest and raised and released tens of thousands of iguanas as an agricultural product.

The park has government permission to sell iguana meat and make other commercial use of the leaf-eating lizards.

“Leather [from iguana] fetches more money than cowhide and you have to reforest in order to support the iguanas,” Rennick said. “What they do is reforest the property, put iguanas on it and you can take out iguanas constantly, and you get a higher yield per hectare [than by raising cattle] and you have restored a forest. It’s a great idea.”

It’s a great experiment, anyway, and if it leads to the reforestation of any rain forests here or elsewhere, it’s a worthwhile endeavor.

Another project that Pro Iguana Verde is part of is a scarlet macaw reintroduction program. The strikingly colorful members of the parrot family, which once thrived from Mexico to Peru, also have been victimized by poaching--they fetch up to $5,000 a bird on the black market--and loss of habitat.

Costa Rica’s largest population of wild scarlet macaws, about 200 birds, nest in Carara Biological Reserve, adjacent to Iguana Park. The staff here is working to restore the resident population through a captive breeding program.

Where Rennick fits in is simple. All five of the Original Canopy Tour operations--which are scattered throughout the country--have a conservation theme and part of the proceeds (a daylong tour generally costs between $45 and $89, depending on the type of tour) is donated to the cause.

“If all this was about is platforms and trees, I’d be bored right now,” said Rennick, 40, an avid climber who gave up his job as a Vancouver financial planner for this. “The whole idea is to get people in there, get them all excited and then deliver the conservation message when I have their keen and undivided attention . . . and when you have them up on that small platform you do have their undivided attention.”

True enough.

Rennick and his crew have had the undivided attention of more than 60,000 customers in the five-plus years since he has been pioneering what he calls an ecologically friendly adventure sport.

Whatever you call it, it’s catching like wildfire. Copycat operations are springing up all over the country, which has Rennick concerned because some of these “pirate operations,” as he calls them, are safer than others and all are using the name, canopy tour.

So far only one person has died playing Tarzan with one of the other companies, a woman who leaned back while climbing a ladder to a platform, thinking she was secured to a safety rope, instead falling to earth while her husband watched in horror.

But Rennick, who boasts an excellent safety record and whose guides are meticulous with their use of safety equipment, says it’s only a matter of time before there are other casualties.

JURASSIC EXPERIENCE

You’ve already been introduced to the tame animals: the iguanas in their enclosure and four beautiful macaws following you around in the aviary.

Now it’s time to enter the jungle. Fresh in your mind are the many poisonous snakes your guide pointed out on a chart back at the office--before asking you to sign a waiver.

So you walk slowly and carry a big . . . bottle of water.

The air is thick with humidity and you thank heaven for the verdant forest canopy and the shade it provides. Still, you stop every few minutes for a drink to replace the fluid flowing so freely from your pores.

You don’t see the iguanas at first, but you hear their footsteps as they run through the bushes. You know they’re only big lizards, but images of velociraptors fill your head.

You plod on, only to be stopped in your tracks by a tiny black frog with blotches of brilliant green. Though only an inch long, the little amphibian packs quite a wallop, able to secrete a substance so powerful that natives used to use it as poison for their blow-darts; hence their name, poison-dart frogs.

Staring down at the trail, you continue, keeping an eye out now for frogs as well as snakes, until you arrive at an unassuming ladder built into the trunk of a towering Guanacaste tree, leading to the first platform, from which you will soon be asked to jump.

One by one, you step farther up the ladder, one guide in front of you and another bringing up the rear. You’re wearing a waist harness and fastened to a safety rope in case you slip, but you’re wary of this get-up and vow not to slip.

Finally, you’re all on the platform, clutching the cables, listening to the guides explain how to slide down the rope to the other platform, fixed to the side of another tree that might as well have a bull’s-eye painted on it--because you’re sure you’re going to slam into it.

While listening intently, you quickly realize that the only thing to keep you from plummeting to your death will be your two gloved hands and a leather strap with steel fasteners--one attached to your waist and the other to the rope.

By applying pressure to the top of the rope with the palm of one hand, you activate the braking mechanism. If you let go, your body weight also does this and you’ll find yourself dangling above the forest floor.

The key is to brake at the perfect time--moments before you smash into the tree--and thus make a soft and uneventful landing on the other platform.

One of the guides goes first, gliding over the forest floor and landing perfectly in the other tree. Standing opposite you, he motions that he’s ready for your arrival and he will tell you when to brake.

A different kind of butterflies are floating around now, inside your stomach, but you finally muster the nerve to take your first leap of faith.

You step off the platform, and for the next several seconds you . . . forget all about a bunch of stupid lizards.

--The Original Canopy Tour can be contacted on the Internet at www.canopytour.co.cr, or in Costa Rica at 011-506-257-5149 or by calling 800-308-3394.