A Day Out To: The Living Rainforest

Earlier this year, on my 23rd birthday, my Mum adopted a two-toed sloth named Cinnamon. As in, she adopted the sloth on my behalf. I’m not just telling you about two unrelated events that happened to coincide on the same day. Anyway, earlier this week we went to visit him.

We were greeted at the entrance by a woman who oozed competence and composure. She singlehandedly manned both the entrance and the gift shop, and at one point even rose up from the ground to make me a smoothie, just as two people in the kitchen were telling me that they thought they were out of ingredients. I don’t think they were lying, I think it was the act of this woman’s hand touching the freezer door that propelled the frozen spinach balls into existence. She seemed to move at about a quarter of the pace of everyday-run-of-the-mill-common-bog-standard-mere-mortal-folk, and yet got everything done at least twice as fast. All while being in a minimum of three places at once. I guess that’s where the famous saying comes from: slow and steady makes a good employee at the Living Rainforest Trust for Sustainable Living.

As for the non-human animals, they were beautiful and plentiful. One of my favourites was the “green iguana (red variant)”. I know. Riddle me that Mr. Linnaeus. My most probable theory is that the scientist responsible for naming that particular iguana was colour blind and wanted to hedge his bets. The (only) low point of the day was seeing a bird-eating tarantula, helpfully labelled simply as “spider” on the map.

When it came to seeing Cinnamon, it proved a trickier task than we’d anticipated. The shaggy sloth is free-roaming (within the parameters of the Living Rainforest, of course, you needn’t fear meeting him on the M4), and on this particular day he’d found a lovely resting spot. Lovely, but profoundly obscured. That part was fine; may God be my witness should I ever choose to criticise a sloth’s choice of branch. What was less fine was having to have the following conversation with a stranger and her child.

Stranger: Can you see him?

Me: Not quite, no

Stranger: I think he’s there, above that cluster of leaves. See? Right there, he’s moving a little now

Me: Ah, right, yes, thank you. Actually, sorry, I’m still not 100% sure I can spot him. Did you say above the leaves?

Stranger: Yeah, like see that big branch there? And these three other easily identifiable markers? Right, well, it’s not near any of them. Let me just gesture vaguely and smugly instead of relaying the most crucial bit of information

Me: Ah yes, brilliant, thank you, that’s great, thanks.

Me: (quietly to my Mum) Can you see him? No, I can’t either.

Then repeat with 3 other families.

Fortunately, we looped back around at the very end to try and have another attempt at finding him. And there he was. A small, but perfect, glimpse of grey between leaves. And nowhere near where that other woman pointed.

p.s. Here’s the website if you were interested in finding out more about where we went: https://livingrainforest.org/