Deep inside a 1,300-hectare rainforest reserve in Ecuador, mere three hours northwest of the equator, you will find Mashpi Lodge, an eco-friendly hotel bursting with activities to teach you about this unique mountain bioclimate and its wildlife – which include cycling along a high wire, listening to frogs and making chocolate.

This being Earth Month, it’s only appropriate that the lodge opened this week for the first guests to enjoy the rich flora and fauna of the bioreserve: colorful butterflies, monkeys, birds, pumas, and orchids galore.

To experience the forest first hand, you can travel along the forest canopy in the “Aerial Tram” – an open-air gondola car – giving you a monkey’s eye view of the treetops and their inhabitants. As you sit in a swiveling chair, for a 360-degree perspective, you can listen to the resident biologist make sense of it all.

Or, for those preferring solitude, climb a ladder and sit on a forest platform, or check out the hummingbird viewpoint (blink and you’ll miss them – they’re the smallest animals, and fastest birds, in the world). Adrenalin junkies can take a zipwire ride through the primeval landscape, or ride an aerial bicycle, designed for two, along a 655-foot-long cable; then cool off in a waterfall. Creatures of the night can go on a nocturnal safari (guided; you don’t want to get lost in the dark jungle). Reptile lovers can learn about frog songs and snake secrets. Or you can just sit in bed and watch it all.

The 22 guestrooms are furnished in a simple, contemporary style, with warm tones, wood and floor-to-ceiling-windows looking onto the rainforest; all have WIFI; suites and bathtubs with views (other rooms have showers). All are TV-less; it’s in a communal area – after all, you’ve got a live-action nature film going on outside your room. There are also outside terraces to tune into the jungle sounds, with secluded yoga-perfect areas; and an extensive library, where you can hear talks from experts.

In the restaurant, ingredients used are garnered from the forest – plantain and chocolate – or locally-grown organic: mandarinas, guavas, naranjillas, squeezed into freshly-made juices. You can gather your own, too – yucca, bananas, palm hearts and coffee, or make cocoa beans into their end delicacies, ripe for eating. After all that culinary excitement, you’ll need to chill out. The spa has a jacuzzi open to the outside and a massage room with treatments featuring jungle ingredients such as earth, stones, herbs and leaves. Swimming is wild, in the rivers.

Mashpi Lodge is working closely with the local community. A quarter of the staff (80% from the surrounding area) will own a stake in the project. As well as being socially responsible, hydroelectric power will be used soon.

Rates from $1,296 per person including tax, transfers from Quito with visits to archaeological sites and museum, and lunch at a volcanic crater, en route; all meals at lodge; guided daily excursions and activities within reserve; rubber boots, rain ponchos and binoculars for your jungle walkabouts (this is a rain forest, after all).

Photos: Mashpi Lodge

Places & Spaces is a travel guide that will inspire you to carve out a vacation on your calendar. All of the gorgeous locations and accommodations in our guide share our concern for the environment. From tent glamping to lavish built environments, fair warning, you’ll feel compelled to pack your suitcase.

The post Places & Spaces: Mashpi Lodge, Ecuador appeared first on EcoSalon.

The Treehotel in Sweden features unique, futuristic camp sites.

Imagine the scene: you’re walking through a forest in northern Sweden, when suddenly you come upon a collection of bizarre objects suspended from trees: a mirrored cube, a UFO, a giant bird’s nest. Have you been abducted into a Dadaistic art installation?

Relax, it’s n0t a flashback to a youthful overindulgence of banned substances, a sojourn through William S. Burroughs’ Interzone or even a Trekkie bootcamp. It’s a 21st century designer eco-hotel-camp called Treehotel.

Treehotel’s green credentials are exactly as you’d expect for a Swedish hotel set in a forest: renewable energy provided by hydroelectric power from the nearby river, LED lighting and water-efficient sinks, and combustion toilets. In most units, waste is heat-blasted at 600C; in the Mirrorcube, your poop gets frozen, while the heat from the freezer’s element is used to heat the room in winter. Dead smart, those Swedes.

The five “treerooms,” designed by leading Scandinavian architects, are all different inside as well as out, with simple furnishings. The UFO, accessed by a ladder underneath has spacey print fabrics, while the ultra-realistic Bird’s Nest is circular with tiny round windows in its pale wood walls. The Cabin is much more conventional, but also larger – a rectangular box with huge windows and an outdoor deck, while the Blue Cone overlooks the river.

The Mirrorcube is like a live work of art. Its outer surfaces show constantly changing images of trees and sky, which you can appreciate from a roof terrace, a more zen alternative to watching TV. Another building houses a sauna and hot tub (this is Sweden, after all). The bad news: this is also where the showers are located, since none of the treehouses has its own tub or shower. This is the Swedish idea of glamping: fab interiors offset outdoor plumbing.

Meals are served, and guests greeted, in a guesthouse run by one of the owners named Britta.

Rates from $573, including tax, breakfast and unbeatable dinner table stories.

Photos: Peter Lundstrom, WDO; Frank Updates via Harper’s Bazaar

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It’s my annual winter visit home in L.A. and we’re braving the dreaded dead heads, again. Yes,  several of my family’s favorite restaurants are decorated – and disgraced – with massive, wild animal trophies on their walls. Trophies, indeed.

Now don’t get me wrong. My people aren’t hunters, just valley folks who like meat. My father’s side came from the meat packing industry in Nebraska. My sister-in-law’s kin founded Hoffy, the packagers of those hot dogs sold at the iconic Pink’s and plugged by singer Pat Boone. My relatives don’t mind seeing deer heads and bear skins tacked on a wall while enjoying a good rare steak. But my daughter does.

“It’s barbaric,” exclaimed 10-year-old, Lauren, with tears in her eyes, when confronted with the stuffed buffaloes, gophers and bucks mounted at Clearman’s Northwoods Inn in Covina.

Dining at the Inn has long been a post-Disneyland stop, starting with my parents when we four kids were little ranch hands. Cherie and Aaron really went in for the burgers, bowls of red cabbage and the mugs of beer, not to mention the buckets of peanuts and ever so folksy tradition of discarding the shells onto the redwood floor. Yes sir, kids, good clean American fun, except for those sad eyes on the stuffed heads with antlers.

The prized kill passes for nostalgic western memorabilia. And it is shocking for a sensitized child to encounter the animal trophies of yore, which emerge as the anti-green in their eyes. It’s especially jarring for Lauren after spending the day at the “happiest place on Earth“, a theme park peopled with woodland critters personified as our pals.

Try to explain to a child why trophies remain on our walls at a time when we shun fur coats and animal testing, a time when global campaigns are waged to protect our defenseless forest friends.

“This restaurant is very old, like from the 60s, and they hung the trophies because it didn’t upset people back then,” I assure my girl,  hoping she will settle down and agree to eat dinner with us. When she was younger I lied to her, telling her the animal heads at the Inn were fake, just like the taxidermy dioramas at the old San Francisco’s Academy of Science, just replicas of real animals. But now, I have to be honest and apologetic and coax her to remain inside the joint and enjoy her meal amid the walls of death. It’s getting more challenging.

I have to admit, I forget about the taxidermy at the Inn until I’m there and Lauren falls apart. I don’t think we will return next year. Really, the salad swimming in mayo and peanut shells on the floor aren’t worth the battle.

And yet, there are more miles to go on this annual trek before I rest.

My brother has made a dinner reservation at the Saddle Peak Lodge to celebrate my mother’s 82nd birthday. The upscale grill in Malibu Canyon is a favorite of the tony celebrities who live in my brother’s exclusive gated community of Hidden Hills, a ranch-filled paradise where multi-million dollar spreads are interspersed with horse trails and dog runs for its animal loving residents. I hear J-Lo just bought a large property there for just herself and the twins. Don’t tell the tabloids!

The problem is the Lodge they all love showcases numerous animal trophies on its walls, as well as exotic game on its overpriced menu. Holy antlers!

This time, I’m protesting. I have put up a stink about returning to the Lodge for yet another celebration; you’d be surprised how much convincing it has taken. Still, it looks like Lauren has won out this time. We will not be back in the Saddle Peak again, bypassing it for a new hip Hollywood spot, BLT Steak on the Sunset Strip with $40 entrees and $10 side dishes of mac and cheese, lobster mashed potatoes and poached green beans. The modern and stark eatery has no dead heads – just large prints and paintings of  various cows and bulls, a sort of homage to the fare you will be enjoying.

Ironic, isn’t it? Those who wouldn’t think of wearing a fox coat to dinner agree to linger over $52 New Zealand Elk Tenderloin amid the corpses. The roaring fire, the delicious wine, the tender elk, all can make you forget. Make you forget, that is, unless you happen to be a 10-year-old child of the eco age.

This is the latest installment in Luanne’s column, Life in the Green Lane.

Main Image: Fury Scaly

Northwoods Inn, Saddle Peak Lodge

The post Trophies Still Roam the Restaurant Range, But I’m Not Game appeared first on EcoSalon.

A couple of days ago I revisited my childhood and caught up with my old friends Dr. Seuss and the Lorax. It was the least I could do, seeing that it was Dr. Suess’s 105th birthday. Of course, he is no longer with us, but The Lorax lives on and should be required reading for anyone aged from 1 to 101 or more.

You do remember the Lorax, don’t you? If not, let me remind you about this character created by Dr. Seuss in 1971. A strange gopher-like creature with a fluffy blond mustache and a sheepish smile, the Lorax battles a greedy businessman named Once-ler who arrives in the forest, builds a huge factory and then fells all the Trufulla trees to create a new product he thinks everyone needs.

He chops and he chops til there are no trees left, despite the Lorax’s warnings that without the Truffula trees, the forest will disappear. And disappear it did, for Once-ler would not stop and in the end the wildlife and the Lorax just had to leave.

The Lorax was ahead of its time with its story of environmental destruction and deforestation. It certainly is now considered a green classic – for kids and adults, too.

Last year, The Lorax was re-released on Earth Day, complete with a special environmental message and printed on recycled paper. The Lorax Project, a child-friendly interactive web site designed to raise awareness of green issues and inspire everyone to be more earth-friendly, was also launched.

Having re-introduced you to the Lorax, it’s only fair you hear what he says in the end…

“Unless
someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.”

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The Highlands of Scotland are one of my favorite places in the world. The countryside is stunningly beautiful with the steep mountains plunging out of glassy clear lochs. The people are friendly and the food is good – the free-range venison, fresh fish, berries, cheeses, and homemade jam and baked goods that is; the deep-fried Mars bars, not so much. If you like a tipple, you can get a wee dram of whisky anywhere you go and even visit the distilleries where it’s made.

For all its charms, there are a few things the Highlands lacks and one of them is trees – not including the estates where the local lord grows plantation pine instead of raising sheep. Vast tracts of the Highlands are marked as forest on the map but this is merely the medieval nomenclature for a deer hunting ground. Most of the Highlands are covered with heather and tussocks and it’s easy to assume this is the land’s natural state.

In fact, Scotland was once covered with forest and a new project is bringing it back. The work is being led by Trees for Life, founded 20 years ago. The organisation is committed to restoring the so-called Caledonian forest to a target area of 600 square miles and they have planted more than 750,000 trees so far. Here’s what they have to say:

The Caledonian Forest originally covered 1.5 million hectares of the Scottish Highlands as a vast primeval wilderness of Scots pine, birch, rowan, aspen, juniper and other trees. Today, though, just 1% of the forest remains, and species such as the beaver, wild boar and lynx have gone. It’s up to us to ensure the survival of this ancient and remarkable woodland. It’s Scotland’s equivalent of the rainforest and it urgently needs our help.

They run volunteer work weeks (video) and there’s a separate volunteer website. But if tree planting isn’t really your scene, there are plenty of ecologically friendly ways to explore the Highlands. Here are a few ideas:

Scotland is a wonderful destination for active wilderness holidays, especially hiking and sea kayaking. Try Responsible Travel or Wilderness Scotland.

Wild camping (i.e. not in a designated campsite) is allowed in Scotland – see the Mountaineering Council of Scotland for details.

If you’re looking for something more comfortable with eco-credentials, try Huntingtower Lodge overlooking Loch Linnhe, near Fort William and Ben Nevis. The lodge is gold-rated in the Green Tourism Business Scheme.

Or there is this adorable treehouse, part of Kinlochlaich House & Gardens, in Appin, Argyll – near Oban and Castle Stalker.

How are you getting to Scotland? There are frequent trains from London, including a sleeper service.The National Express East Coast (formerly GNER) trains up the East Coast have free wifi on board – not that you’ll need your laptop when soaking up the natural beauty of the Highlands. Once you’re there, savor the surroundings and stay put – or catch the local bus service if you need to get from town to town.

Image: ccgd

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