Blog written by Minnesota Zoo’s Connections Coordinator, Liz Dengate

Within an hour of landing in Costa Rica, our bus was pulling through fields of plantains and beans to an open wooden building on a hill. Still foggy from our two flights, and having woken up at two am to catch the first at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport, the thirteen students and I trickled out of the bus and up a steep slope to the crowded building. Local high school students – and a handful of other Minnesotans, on an exchange program from the School of Environmental Studies – greeted us with whoops and cheers.

Within another several minutes, now with a plate of burritos, salad and fresh salsa, I stepped apart from the swarm of students and teachers for a moment, and out onto the broad deck. There was a view down a long, misty valley, tangled with different crops – planted and growing together, each species benefitting from the shade or the nitrogen-fixing roots of its neighbors – and the sun was setting at the end of the valley, in deep purples and oranges. It was beautiful, stunning, like so many other views I’d get in the country over the next eleven days, but after a minute I turned and looked back into the building I’d walked out of. My thirteen students, each of whom I’d only met once before this morning, were eating their own burritos, talking to new students, and trying out new Spanish phrases. They’d been awake for at least eighteen hours at that point, but their eyes were bright, their gestures animated.

I knew from the start that our trip was going to be extraordinary.

The Minnesota Zoo Education Department runs out-of-state Travel EdVentures each year – one for adults, one for college students, and one, like the one I led in August, for high school students (this one was a partnership with Ruta Verde Nature Tours in Costa Rica). The Zoo’s mission is to connect people, animals, and the natural world to save wildlife, and there is no better way to connect people to wildlife than by immersing them in it.

Most of the students I traveled with on this trip had never left the country before. For all we talk about rainforests in school, they’d never stood in the muggy heart of one before. This trip was a spectacular chance to literally and metaphorically transport these students and give them a new perspective on conservation, climate change, and a new diversity of wildlife.

Our eleven days were packed neatly with new experiences. There were the things that got the students out of their comfort zones. We went zip-lining through the cloud forest in Monteverde, the end of each line lost in a dense cloud, the start of each at the top of a tower where we could stand at eye level with various epiphytes clinging to the wet boughs of impossibly enormous trees (standing in line was the perfect time to casually discuss some adaptations of plants in a cloud forest). We rode horses down rutted dirt roads in the mountains, chasing rainbow after rainbow, spotting all kinds of delicious fruits growing alongside the road. We split into smaller groups to raft down a wild river on the Caribbean side of the country, through rapids Class I through IV. We hiked up and down steep slopes and across wavering, slippery bridges in the rainforest for miles.

And there were the things that made biodiversity and conservation come alive. The lines of leafcutter ants crossing the path outside our rooms. The climate change researcher lecturing us in the middle of the forest. The monkeys we saw – and heard – from the roads. The foggy early morning spent standing quietly under trees, watching a plethora of birds we’d never seen before fly purposefully above us. The tiny green vine snake flying across a boulder’s surface. The agoutis, coatis, ten-inch grasshoppers, and tiny bats that went from being exciting and exotic to being thought of as nearly as normal as squirrels. The sharp corners of an ancient lava flow. We helped out a sea turtle conservation center and listened to lodge owners, waiters and guides talk about land protection and clean energy. We peered under logs and turned over giant leaves. And the students, constantly and importantly, asked questions.

On one of our last nights in the country, while we were staying in a lush forest on the coast by the Osa Peninsula, I gathered everyone on an open deck, passed out sheets of paper, and told everyone to write for fifteen minutes about what it felt like to be there. The air laid on us heavily, a humid, warm sheath. The buzzing of insects in the trees and vines was omnipresent. The students wrote busily, and turned in their paragraphs.

“In February,” I told them, “When we’re suffering through a freezing winter, I’ll email your words back to you, and you’ll be able to re-live what it felt like here.” It had been another long, busy day and the dinner bell was about to ring so I didn’t expect too much from the quick writing, but when I looked over the pages later, I was blown away. In flowing, articulate language the students painted pictures of this new ecosystem – and how they felt in it: like new people, like explorers, like braver and more enlightened versions of themselves.

I don’t think all of the students will go into wildlife or conservation related fields, although some of them will, and will be a boon to the field. All of them, however, will return to their midwestern high schools and their families and friends with a new perspective on our world. It is so much bigger, so much more complicated, so much stranger and richer than even a travel through the United States can teach us. Over the course of our eleven days, I delighted in watching the students bond with one another and create new friendships, but I also loved watching them ask more and more complex questions, express new interests in field science, and start linking the climate change issues we see in the Great Lakes region to issues they’re seeing in the mountains and coastal areas of Costa Rica.

When we arrived back at the airport to a throng of waiting parents, the students and I were all changed people. A host of immersive, exhausting, interactive days had left us saturated with stories. We collected our bags, took one more group photos, gave hugs, and separated. As I watched them depart in their family units, I knew: they were taking those memories and stories with them, they were bursting with them; and when they did burst, those stories of mysterious wildlife and the importance of wild spaces would explode into a new world, and into new minds.

Interested in attending one of the Minnesota Zoo’s Travel EdVentures? We offer both out-of-state trips and shorter, more local explorations of Minnesota. Learn more about our upcoming trips for teens, college students, and adults at http://mnzoo.org/education/travel-edventures/.