Ecotourism

Tourism and ecotourism are not the same thing although some people do use them interchangeably. I would say tourism is traveling for leisure or pleasure where as ecotourism is tourism that puts emphasis on the plants, animals and the environment in general. I would classify most of what we are doing as ecotourism, but I will give several examples of both varieties from the trip.
First I will start with some simple tourism we have taken part in. We have taken several walking tours of San Jose which I have mentioned before, we went to some tourist sites like the volcano, the waterfall, and Monte Verde all of which some people utilize as tourist attractions, but some like us utilize as ecotourism opportunities, and most recently we went to the beach which was strictly for pleasure, although some people took part in a nature hike which would be ecotourism.
I would like to focus on Monte Verde for a minute. Some people go there to view the forest, and maybe see some animals if they are lucky, and take part in tourist activities like 4-wheeler tours, or canopy tours. We focused on some ecotourism aspects though. On our walking tour it took my group about two hours to walk less than a mile. This was because the guide was telling us lots of information about the forest and its history plus we were stopping to look close at bugs, trees, flowers, and many other parts of the flora and fauna of the cloud forest. Some people (tourists) would be satisfied with walking through the forest and seeing nothing and if they did this our hike would have taken about 10 or 15 minutes.
I would also like to revisit the coffee plantations for a minute. Café Britt was a tourist attraction for sure. We saw very little land where they grow coffee, and we were rushed through one field and their processing and packaging plant to go see a play about coffee. It was educational but it was a tourist’s experience. At De Café Tal Daisy’s outfit, we hiked up and down the mountain to get to here location seeing many nice views and walking by or through many of her fields to get to her small mill and drying station. We got to ask her questions about her past experience and how she got to where she is today. I would call this more of an ecotourist opportunity because we got to interact with not only the owner but also the environment. I should mention that part of ecotourism is helping to sustain the environment and Daisy is not really doing all she could in that aspect because she is a traditional farmer not an organic farmer. Café Britt says they are all organic but they buy from many farmers and show the tourists very little of their operation so who is to say if they are being sustainable or not.
My point for this blog was obviously that tourism and ecotourism are not the same thing. Being that we are here to learn about sustainability it seems that we should be doing as much ecotourism as possible…and I think we are doing quite a bit. We are learning loads about the environment everywhere we go and it is a great experience. One example I will give is that I would have originally thought that coffee was bad for the soil because they never rotate crops and use the plant over and over. In actuality this might happen back in Ohio but here especially in the mountains the soil is very rich with nutrients so there coffee farmers can just keeps producing coffee without hurting the environment too much.
I think we will change gears when we go to see how bananas are produced. For example according to travbuddy.com about 1/3 of banana production cost goes to pesticides. This cannot be good for the environment at all. First the bugs obviously die. Then some other organisms are hurt from consuming the pesticides, some animal’s food is gone because the bugs die, and the chemicals can run into the water and hurt us. These are just a few things that are bad about pesticides there are many more consequences from dumping pesticides all over the ground and plants. Bananas represent a large portion of the income in Costa Rica because they are mass produced; they all have chemicals to help keep the bugs away so the environment must be paying a hefty toll.
I assume I will learn a great deal about bananas in the coming weeks when we visit the banana plantations and will be able to go into more detail about the sustainability of bananas. It will be interesting to compare and contrast bananas and coffee after we visit the banana plantations.