WHEN the Portuguese landed in Brazil 500 years ago last weekend, the sight that greeted them was of a huge rainforest, which then ran along much of Brazil's Atlantic coast.
Trinidad's economy is dependent on the island's large supply of oil and natural gas reserves so tourism isn't its main priority, but the cricket-obsessed country has some beautiful beaches, a huge rainforest and, of course, Carnival, which runs from Christmas to Fat Tuesday.
They can explore the Kasarang Wilds, a huge overgrown rainforest that's home to the Mogu forces and their lizard people slaves.
When our son Dax was 19 months old we took him to the jungles of North Sumatra, in the Leuser national park - a huge, primal rainforest that's home to elephants, orang-utans, clouded leopards, any number of civet cats and other squirrelly looking things.
A World Heritage site, the landscape of huge cliffs, deep rainforest gulleys and sandstone canyons and waterfalls forms part of the traditional country of the Aboriginal people.
Proponents of palm oil point out that it's cheap and efficient to grow and use, although critics point out that huge tracts of rainforest have been cleared – at a rate of around 690,000 hectares a year between 2006 and 2010 – to make way for the crop, putting engendered species such as the orangutan under severe threat.
The booming demand in Europe and Asia has led to growing concern that huge swaths of rainforest are being cut down to make way for plantations - damaging important eco-systems on which animals and local people depend - and threatening the survival of one of the world's last great apes, the orang-utan, the poster boy for a gathering global campaign.
Cattle ranching has been the primary driver of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, as huge swaths of rainforest are cleared to make way for agriculture.
Glacial moraines have mosses and lichens growing on them, lush coastal rainforest includes huge Sitka spruce and western hemlock, and alpine tundra occurs above elevations of 2,500 feet (760 metres).
The train from Colombo takes about three hours, and for much of the second half the track wriggles around on a high shelf cloaked in rainforest, a huge drop down to terraced paddy fields and distant plains on one side.
The Amazon accounted for nearly a third of the "catastrophic" loss, showing huge tracts of pristine rainforest are still being disrupted despite the Brazilian government slowing deforestation rates in recent years.
