reasons to not live in tropical areas

Reason 1:

reason 2:

I have no idea why I watched #2 in its entirety. Not going to follow this thread.

Erk!
I made it to "botfly larva secreting waste"...

Been here for nearly 9 years now, I have never had a bot fly. Much ado about nothing. Animals do have them, but there is a mixture you make, just dab it on, and all is well.

That snake looks like a micker, non - poisnous. What a bunch of wimps...

Why not live in Montana.

Not fond of snakes or botflies but my #1 reason not to live in, nor ever visit, the tropics is the stinkin' heat and even more stinkin' humidity. Even here at 37 degrees N and 6200 ft. I'm essentially pissed off from May until October. Give me a good ol' blizzard any day. Suspect I was an Eskimo in all my past lives.

parasites and fungal infections.

having to learn latin to pronounce the names of your new infections

I just happened to come to this post. My plan is to go live on a tropical island. I know that island fairly well (visited it several times for about a month each time).
I am sure those snakes (reason 1) are not there. I never heard of the flies you mention (reason 2) there, only of mosquitos sometimes causing diseases.
My reasons to choose for a tropical climate are: I function better at higher temperatures and when the sun is visible (where I live now it's often very cloudy, winter here means: cold rain); I love tropical fruits (which do not grow where I am now). And I have some more reasons to move to that specific tropical island.

Just with any district, there are good spots and there are less-than-good spots. Gee....this sounds like I'm talking about permaculture ----- that old standard answer, "It depends."

I've lived in my location for over a dozen years now. It's in the tropics, but incredibly different from other tropical locations. Lumping all tropic locations together and calling them the same would be analogous to lumping all the different European countries together and claiming that they're all the same. My particular location is not the hot, humid, buggy, wet tropics that people tend to think of.

I prefer my tropical location for several reasons among which is year around food production, healthier and kinder in my body, and easier for me to live a low input/low impact lifestyle.

By the way, we don't have those giant snakes here, but we do have some nasty stinging/biting insects. But I'll take them over blizzards, freezing temperature, and icy ground. Ah....to each their own. 😀

Last year, my girlfriend went to Belize for a wildlife biology project. Stayed 2 weeks, got a bug bite on her butt that died down shortly. One month after returning, the bite swelled up. Quite a scene at the doctors office when they removed a dead botfly larvae.... Americans!

I get the feeling that if I die freezing in the woods next month, it wont make for quite such a funny story. And isnt that whats important?

Malaria has always been my reason for not 100% hating winter.  And I am not a fan of winter by any means.  But I guess in places where they have malaria no-one wanders away and freezes to death so... that's the trade-off I guess.  Otherwise the extended growing season and extremely cheap cost of living would be absolutely worth it.  I work with some ladies who have had malaria several times.  They talk about it like it's the flu, I was pretty shocked.  But a flu where if you don't get drugs you are about 20% likely to die or have brain damage

I also like no earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes, massive bugs and spiders (ok, dock spiders are pretty scary), venomous snakes, carnivorous reptiles (ok we've got bears), fish that swim up your pee-hole or devour you in a swarm, parasites that give you elephantiasis... the mounds of snow outside actually look a little nicer to me now that I've made this short list  

Norma Guy wrote:
I also like no earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes, ...

Um... there are a lot of non-tropical places with these three things. And tropical places without them.

Having spent considerable time in the tropics (and lovin' it!), I will say: after a while, you itch all the time. I suppose the reason is random bug bites, not necessarily from bugs you saw (I got redbugs in Venezuela; that was the worst itch ever). And fire ants are ruthless! So far, I have not found an effective solution.

I plan to live in the southern Philippines . I've lived here for four months so far, without any serious sting. We have cobras but I'm not put off by that. There are simple ways to avoid them and you have a lot of time with cobra bites. In Kenya, I disturbed a black mamba. Respiratory arrest in a couple of minutes.

We don't have extreme temperatures, because of being surrounded by water. The highest temperature I have experienced here, is 95 degrees Fahrenheit. I have experienced over 100 degrees a few times in North America . The worst  being 114 degrees in the badlands of South Dakota. 104 degrees in kelowna British Columbia Canada.

The biggest danger in the tropics are the people. That's true here and much more true in most other tropical places. I can't think of anywhere in tropical Africa or South America, where a person of European descent is not at some increased risk of violence.

Many tropical islands have less risk of that and they also lack some of the worst creepy crawlies. Temperatures aren't so extreme on smaller islands. I'm sure I would die of some rot disease, if i tried to live beside the Congo river. That's if my kidnappers didn't kill me first. I met a man who foolishly took his tuna boat up the Congo. It cost over two hundred thousand dollars for him to get South African mercenaries to Rambo him out of there. Several of his captors were killed.

There is a religious element to many kidnappings here in the Philippines. I'm sticking to places that are predominantly Catholic. There is a long tradition of piracy and slavery on Southern Mindanao and in all of the Muslim autonomous region. I won't be shopping for a home there. I've met migrants from there, who never want to return. They prey on their own people more than on the few visitors.

Yes, I agree Dale. Most of the counties in the Tropics zone are inhabited by disadvantaged, very poor, non-European people. These areas also tend to have very high population densities. So, besides culture/religion/freedom issues, it’s more of a ‘dog-eat-dog’ environment because their respective governments provide very little in the way of financial, aged and medical support. Desperate people often take drastic measures, so ‘foreigners’ can be easy targets.

Besides human interactions, living in the Tropics simply requires a different skill set of do’s & don’ts – lifestyle modifications e.g. water and soil borne pathogens; certain insects, animals and plants, and the sun intensity. Food and drinking water hygiene are at the top of the list – food can spoil within an hour if left unrefrigerated, consider all water to be contaminated – lots of people get seriously ill when they forget to consider water quality when simply brushing their teeth or opening their mouth under the shower.

I see a lot of poverty driven by young people's desire to leave the farms and head to the city. The average farmer in the philippines is 57 years old , so a crunch is coming . Many of these young people have family land that they could work for free and they could live in homes that are already existing on the property.

Instead they go to the city and obtain low-paying jobs. I know several who earn under 400 pesos a day , roughly $7.50 us. They spend all of their earnings for food and rent and they get nowhere , sometimes riding the treadmill for 12 hours a day. Some have two jobs.

I've also met a few young people who have stayed on the farms, given to them by their aging parents or grandparents. There is a 12 month harvest with no need for irrigation in many places. Homes don't need to be heated or cooled, so there's not a great need for cash income. If a person can lay off the alcohol and drugs , almost every peso earned can be saved. Yet, they keep coming to the large cities and abandoning the farmland.

I've decided to become a farmer here because when you look at production per acre and the amount of labor required it's highly profitable. People with no resources who have the opportunity to occupy good land, for free, are choosing the rat race instead.

I've also met several people who spend more than a quarter of their income on electronics , mostly cell phones. These phones give them access to YouTube and Facebook and the Philippine equivalent to Amazon . They are constantly introduced to the lavish lifestyles lived by people in other parts of the world and given the opportunity to part with their meager earnings,  in vain attempts to keep up with Kim Kardashian.

Holy sh.t Batman.  It's not fair that the King Cobra can get 18 ft long, look you in the eye, and also zap you with venom.  

Might I also mention this reason:

I would choose the tropics anytime, after all, we are a tropical species adapted to that environment, but many tropical countries are poor and uneducated, there is a lot of chemicals, pollution that has been banned years ago in Europe/US, and even if "regulations" sounds boring, they can actually be on your side, like not allowing mobile phone masts on school and other dangerous places. And, car/scooter/road accidents are not that uncommon in some tropical places.
That said, each place is different, and if I could choose, I'd love to come back to the tropics, it's like my genetic memory is saying "I'm coming home".

Having lived at various latitudes I’ve come to see pluses and minuses in each with the tropics coming out ahead by a margin.

Sure, there are nasty pathogens and parasites in the warm places -malaria, dengue, rat lung-worm...but here in Appalachia -possibly due to a shifting climate- we have a totally unmanageable tick and chigger problem.  Tick borne disease is no joke and it is getting worse in places where it was a relatively low risk before.   You simply can’t spend time in the woods as you used to.  Even now in the middle of December I will get covered in deer ticks if I walk down into our valley.  We’ve had to start treating the animals year-round for ticks.  There is no complete and lasting protection for human beings that is safe -at least none that I can tolerate.

Having had Lyme many years ago, I will forever deal with the damage suffered through lousy, delayed diagnosis and treatment.

Kinda crazy that so much of this place has become virtually uninhabitable from parasites.

I find most risks in at least some tropical regions a little easier to avoid.  Ticks and chiggers are insidious.  No doubt they are present in some warmer places too.  I hope they continue to be rare in the places I frequent.  

Mosquitos can be a problem in tropics, from sunset till sunrise, but they are also present in colder latitudes, and they are even worse there, like in north of Sweden for instance. They are smaller and quicker (and maybe more desperate/hungry). Going out with a head-net, is not uncommon, it's really that bad.

Mosquitos are a problem outside dusk to dawn in the tropics... if you get out into the jungle.  Never completely light in there.  Or anywhere in the deep shade for that matter.  And they are year round, not seasonal like in the areas closer tot he poles.  Based on my experience, they are more intense nearer the poles though, probably due to having to cram more feeding and breeding into shorter periods.

In the tropics where I grew up they were a constant thing.  But not too bad in intensity.

Now the little biting flies that came out when the river was down... those were a pain. Like blackflies up in Canada.  You'd see people with dark skin completely mottled with little white scars.  Those were not scar from mosquitos. Since they emerged only at very low water, they were also in that category of short active period and thus the intensity was high.  Netting has to be pretty fine to keep them off.

Snakes... the scary part was I am still not convinced all the poisonous varieties have been cataloged in the Amazon. So it was always "better be safe."  We really didn't see that many though.  Not that they weren't around, just hard to see in the vegetation. I most often saw them in the water where their motion caused ripples/wakes to draw the eye.

But insects were the big threat to comfort and health.  And a few aquatic creatures (anacondas, caimans, piraiba (man-eater catfish), candiru, electric eels, sting rays... and to a far lesser degree piranhas.)

Flooding was the biggest natural disaster threat.  Nasty storms on occasion that could flatten chunks of old growth forest.  We felt earthquakes, but they were hundreds of miles away in Andes.  

I will give one simple reason I personally don’t prefer to live in the tropics:  I personally like having 4 distinct seasons.  Actually, while I love the region I live in, in my opinion it’s sole shortcoming is that it is too far south.  I actually really like winter, love snow and I really miss blizzards.  I kinda liked the “why not to” picture of Montana.  My family is from Minnesota, I grew up in central Illinois which can get some nice blizzards, but Southern Illinois has a distinctly more southern climate.

I will gladly take the snow!!

Eric

Dan:

Storms can definitely also happen in colder latitudes.

Seen quite a few snakes in the wild, and had couple close encouters (snakes "warning" me, attacking without biting, to scare), and I can say that snakes do not wish to bite one, snakes will actually warn, hiss, scare one before biting, they do that out self-preservation, not visciousness.

I am personally more afraid of bear and moose. Had a close encounter with an angry moose, and that was one of the most scary situations I've experienced. Bear I've have never met, and do not wish to meet one.

It's true there are more bugs, critters in the tropics, but I would say I miss all the sounds of the rainforest/tropics, strange and loud bird calls, all sort of insects, monkeys, bushbabies (Africa), geckoes.. Nature is more quiet in the colder latitudes, and forest/nature can seem more lifeless in a way...

But on the other hand, in the colder latitudes nature is more peaceful, maybe not so overwhelming. Flower are more subtle and delicate, and there is softness in the air. Seasons are nice to experience, and the light in the north, on a nice summer day is something special, different from the hard glare of the tropical sun. Monsoons are not the best time of the year in the tropics, and many animals, bugs etc can come in n houses to seek shelter, which can produce some nasty surprises. Lets not mention cockroaches and rats in the tropics, in the north one might have a mice problem, but that is not so bad, they can be quite cute.

Lana Weldon wrote:
It's true there are more bugs, critters in the tropics, but I would say I miss all the sounds of the rainforest/tropics, strange and loud bird calls, all sort of insects, monkeys, bushbabies (Africa), geckoes.. Nature is more quiet in the colder latitudes, and forest/nature can seem more lifeless in a way...

I miss the bird calls/song, the plethora of frog sounds, even caiman and howler monkeys.

\

Hi Ashley, and welcome to Permies!

Where did the fire ants come from?  Did this just start happening this year?

It's an incredibly beautiful morning here in New Brunswick.  Pockets of intense fog rolling in off the ocean with the morning sun lighting it up like a warm flame.  It's June tenth and there's fucking frost and I've started a fire for the third time this week.  Sorry, what's wrong with tropical areas again?

Timothy Markus wrote: I've started a fire for the third time this week.  Sorry, what's wrong with tropical areas again?

Ha. Here from semi-tropical southern hemisphere (occasional) paradise: it's 57F in my office and my hands are numb. It's been raining for a week (thank god, before that it hadn't rained since January and we are rationing water) and my dog in my front yard could be mistaken for a hog in a mud wallow. I know by next week we'll be back to normal but.... tropical houses are made for HEAT. On the occasions when it's not hot, these homes are not ideal. And this is why I usually spend June and July visiting family up north.....