We’d never been to the jungle. We’d experienced the savannahs and coasts of South Africa with their giraffes and lions, elegant grasshoppers, vervet monkeys and penguins. We’ve hiked the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico and seen armadillos and road runners; the thick pine forests of the Adirondacks teeming with white-tailed deer, beautiful coyotes and black bears. But we’d never been to where the toucans and howler monkeys live. Until last month. We have friends who have a home in the cloud forest of Costa Rica. And they invited us to come. And after a harrowing ride up the mountain in a four-wheel drive vehicle on what could only generously be called a road (although a feat of engineering in such terrain), we arrived at their lovely eco-friendly place: few walls and abundant windows, a wrap-around porch and a beautiful garden full of native plants. Bananas. Hundreds, maybe thousands of bananas. Did I mention that there were lots of bananas? And mangoes, and papayas, and guavas and other delicious fruits whose names I don’t recall.
And every morning the hummingbirds arrived—roufus-tailed and Jacobin—swooping and diving in a daredevil aerial ballet. The aracari and the toucan would come to feast on the banana slices left for them in the bamboo feeders. And the chachalaca and the grackles and Baltimore orioles vacationing south for the winter. Down from the mountain on the rivers and at the coast there were herons and scarlet macaws and pelicans. Spectacular trogons. Snowy egrets. And iguanas cavorting near the Pacific, sharing the shade with swimmers and boogie-boarders. And clever capuchin monkeys, acrobatic squirrel monkeys with their ringed tails, curious coati, slyly gliding caiman, and astonishing morpho butterflies fluttering weightlessly along the jungle roads, glistening sapphire wings in the sun; and the milky-white and grey brahman cows and their calves regarding us in seeming serenity as we jostled along the mountain road past their grazing fields.
At night, the huge leaves of the banana trees flapped in the breeze sounding like an audience of animals applauding the never-ending chorus of cicadas and who-knows-what-other jungle bugs singing their Ligeti-inspired song. Howler monkeys groaned and snorted high up the trees. It’s a music that surrounded and swaddled us as we lay awake wondering what was rustling and prowling just beyond the porch screen. That music stayed with me even when we journeyed into the towns and cities for cerveza and gallo pinto, or climbed even higher in the mountains to search (unsuccessfully, it turned out) for the elusive quetzal. It was only on the plane home, after a week of astonishing birds and animals and the company of wonderful friends that I realized I hadn’t listened to human-made music in days. And as I put in my earbuds and attempted to drown out the engine noise with Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, it was the jungle clamor of the monkeys, the whine of the bugs and tree frogs and the squawk and twitter of the birds that hummed in my head as Strauss painted his mountain landscape—nothing of the Alps about it.
