So, You Want to Visit a Rainforest?

I do too, and probably, like me, you had tropical rainforests in mind: hot, humid climates and permanent “summers”. However, by definition a rainforest is merely a forest with a minimum annual rainfall of around six feet, or six inches a month. In the cold polar circles, no forests experience this much rain, but in the temperate zone, where the sun is never directly overhead, there are rainforests which experience moderate temperature seasons. These rainforest go as far towards the polar circles as Norway, southern Alaska, New Zealand, and even the southern tip of Chile. Most of uninhabited Japan was also temperate rainforest.

The tropical zone, being near the equator, isn’t associated with the temperate seasons of spring through winter, with summer and winter differences being very small. Because Earth rotates on a tilted axis, every location on Earth experiences temperature seasons, but the poles experience them the most drastically. Days and nights are both 12 hours year-round at the equator, which the sun hits directly semiannually in the spring and autumn equinox, while the sun is only directly overhead the rest of the tropics once a year. Visual. Temperatures are high year round, so the only ’seasons’ are dry and wet due to the nature of the Earth’s oscillating tropical rain belt. Sounds great, right? Well, the human population seems to do well in this tropical zone as 40% of the world’s population lives there, and that percentage is estimated to be 60% by 2060. ¹

Okay, so which one(s) should you visit? Well, first a map of the world’s tropical rainforests:

As can be seen, there are heavy concentrations in northern and eastern Brazil, Central America, Central Africa and Madagascar, and in and around Southeast Asia. Even visually, these ecosystems are quite unique.

Northern Australia:

Amazon in Brazil:

Costa Rica:

Malaysia:

Temperate rainforest in Washington state for comparison:

Which one you should visit first will depend on a wide variety of factors such as interests, proximity, safety, wilderness ability, expense, and access. In the coming days, I’m going to look into some of the options and pros and cons of visiting each of these, because I’m determined to get to one of them myself before too long.