Kapuscinski
My favorite writer and personal hero, Ryszard Kapuscinski, has a better way to describe that tropics than how I put it.
In his book, The Shadow of the Sun, he writes (about Africa):
… the actual smell of the tropics is somewhat different. We instantly recognize its weight, its sticky materiality. The smell makes us at once aware that we are at that point on earth where an exuberant and indefatigable nature labors, incessantly reproducing itself, spreading and blooming even as it sickens, disintegrates, festers, and decays.
Later, he writes:
In the tropics, however, the flora exists in a state of frenzy, in an ecstacy of the most untrammeled procreation. One is struck immediately by a cocky, pushy abundance, an endless eruption of an exuberant, panting mass of vegetation, all the elements of which - tree, bush, liania, vine, growing, pressing, stimulating, inciting one another - have already become so interlocked, knotted, and clenched that only sharpened steel, wielded with a horrendous amount of physical force, can cut through it a passage, path, or tunnel.
