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Today is the long awaited and much anticipated chocolate tour. Costa Rica is no longer the important power it used to be in chocolate production, but we didn't know that, so there aren't a lot of producers around. However, Siena had found this one on the web and we were about to give it a go...
Our driver, Sterling, picked us up at 8 after a yummy pura vida breakfast. He turned out to be a good guy, good English, enthusiastic, chatty and we all liked him. He was given a brief to get some rope at some point during the day to help us shore up our poor speedo bag and make a false handle. We paused at the very impressive La Paz waterfall where the water falls so hard into the river below it bubbles up like it's boiling. Very impressive. Then we went on to La Virgen de Sarapique where we first took a boat trip along the river. It was nice enough, but we'd a little blasé these days about seeing monkeys and crocs that the camera isn't so hard worked! We enjoyed our little stroll along, and the driver did a good job of holding the boat against the current while we watched monkeys, toucans, other birds. We realised we were running out of time for our tour at Tirimbina which would have been a disaster, so we turned the boat around and he hit the gas full steam til we got back to the dock Finn and Derry loved it, they managed to get soaking wet dragging their hands in the water behind the boat!
Anyway, it was on to the Tirimbina reserve and the chocolate tour. We loved it. We had to walk 20 minutes or so through the rainforest - we were on the Caribbean side of the mountains and it was much more humid. Amazing how different it gets with small changes in location, height.... we crossed over the longest hanging bridge in CR (they don't advertise that!) so it was a little late to warn those suffering from vertigo! Anyway we all handled it without issue - but it does look extremely long at over 200m!
We arrived at the chocolate plantation which is a very unassuming affair - here they don't mass produce, but as part of the ecological reserve they are recapturing and educating about the way chocolate used to be made. So we learnt about the trees, the fruits, and we watched how in 10 days you go from fruit on the tree (literally, it grows direct from the branch) through fermenting and drying to cacao beans, then in 30 minutes you can be drinking chocolate! A roast, a grind, add some other ingredients (typically sugar and cinnamon) and you're away! The original chocolate was a drink - for royalty - not bars or lumps, and we learnt a great deal. Can't say the kids particularly enjoyed the chocolate - it was dark and pure, quite different from the processed variety! We learnt, for example, why hersheys tastes so horrid - apparently they take all the cacao butter out for the pharmaceutical industry and replace it with palm oil, hence the rubbish taste (apologies for any big Hersheys fans, but you really ought to try the proper stuff!).
Siena was in her element, helping at every stage. The others joined in too, but it was her show and she got a huge amount of satisfaction in everything but the taste! Finn was more interested in his frog spotting!
Curiosity and craving satisfied, we returned across the hanging bridge (strange how our happy senses stimulated by the chocolate made it seem far less daunting!) and back to the shop, where of course we just had to buy some!!
Happy and tired we returned to Sterling's van, where we caught a look at a sloth who'd been above it all afternoon. We came straight back to pura vida, via a successful rope purchase and through the cloud and made it back in a lot less time than we'd taken to get there.
Suzanne got busy with the packing, as we're off to a new experience and need a different arrangement of bags - it meant that just about everything was splayed out on the floor - principally because we can't use the one bag as it hasn't got a handle, and we need to find a better way!
Dinner tonight was at pura vida, and Nhi didn't let us down with her delicious food. Everyone is starting to feel a little better - still not totally sorted, and the medicine is still going in, but we're a long way from the state we were in just a couple of days back. We no longer need to carry a toilet roll around with us just in case!
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