visitng villa vanilla and another hair rasiing driving experience

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Thanks to the monkey visit on Tuesday which started at 5.30am and lasted till about 7am, Tuesday was a looong day. We checked out of the hotel at 8.30 since the power had been shut off at 8am so there was no point in hanging around and we drove to a local spice farm called Villa Vanilla.

With not knowing what to expect, combined with getting a personal tour from the owner of the farm we had an amazing time. Henry was originally from Chicago, who had come to CR 30 years ago with the Peace Corp and stayed. About 21 years ago he bought a dying vanilla farm and has turned it into one of the few organic” bio-metric” self sustaining vanilla, cinnamon, all spice, peppercorn, cocoa bean farms in the region. Henry was a great tour guide because he wanted us to use all of our senses in our experience at his farm, having us guess plants by smelling the leaves, looking for fruit bearing trees, feeling the texture of plants and why they were maid that way, listening to the history and the bio mechanics behind a farm such as his and of course in the end tasting some of the oddest, somewhat tasty - some not so tasty products from his farm, including a sweet tea made from the cinnamon bark that had no added sugar, and a chocolate ice ream that had chili pepper and cinnamon.

The best part was we were able to buy negotiate the purchase of half a kilo of premium vanillas beans for Elena and Adam and Jay and I to split and eventually share with those of our friends who are true cooking aficionados. The great thing about vanilla beans are they never spoil, once kept in a glass jar “Henry recommended” they will last forever - he has beans 12 years old that he still uses. He also gave us some great ideas for using the beans such as putting a piece in with sugar and the sugar will take on the flavor, then use the flavor in coffee or a baking recipe and you get the added flavor.

We had a blast on the farm and I particular enjoyed learning about how he has made it into a sustainable land using every bit that comes from the land to the build the land up.

We got on the road by 12 to head up to San Ramon, but unfortunately our fears came true with the “Bridges of Death” we had heard they were being worked on and people had experienced wait times of an hour at each one to get across, in the end it was an hour for one and 20 minutes for another, but the downside was it lost valuable travel time for us and in the end had us traveling some precarious roads late at night. We would have been fine but heavy rain last week caused mud slides on the roads we needed to take close to San Ramon. We were lucky to find a guy who spoke English and gave us the back roads way to get to San Ramon, what freaked us out was when he said he would come to a steep hill and he meant steep - the car was practically vertical for way too long to be good for ones heart, we were all quite tense going up that part. In the end a 3 - 4 hour trip took us closer to 5 since we had a few wrong turns but considering we are not from this area ,nor speak the dominate language we did really well. Even with getting a bit turned around, I still have to say that CR is a very easy country to navigate through, even with some of the primitive of areas, good signage is still present when getting from one major town to the other.

We were super happy to see the road that led straight to our hotel, hungry, tired and definitely fed up with being in the car, we made our final bumpy drive to our hotel, we were a little spooked by a black horse who appeared out of nowhere and we eventually passed by and feared he would back kick our car but didn’t. You see our hotel is in the middle of the Los Angeles National Preserve and boarded by the current president’s 3000+ acre Jersey cow farm. So we are up in the mountains, kind of in the middle of nowhere and the hotel property is a gated compound.

The property was built and owned by a previous president years ago, the main building is a huge hacienda with wooden and slate floors, large open great rooms with floor to ceiling windows, nature is accented everywhere. The lodging for guests are called casitas and are little cabins spread through the property. I guess because it is green season, essentially slow season we both got upgraded to the honeymoon suite, which are the biggest casitas with Jacuzzi tubs, private balconies and a big bedroom with a fire place, rocking chairs and a leather couch. Can we just live here for the rest of our lives????

We have the same amazing sounds of the birds chirping in the morning and then every once in a while a mooooooo which is cool and different from being in Quepos. A three hour distance has brought new species of birds, insects, plants and mammals and we are learning a lot from the staff and tour guides.

The only down side is the distance from the town about half an hour and the fact there is only one restaurant which serves practically the same menu for lunch and dinner. But we have solved part of that problem by going into town to the Maxi Bodega, a cross between a Wal-mart and a Costco and we got supplies to make sandwiches and snacks so that we can avoid the same meals for lunch and dinner.

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Photos

green peppercorns
these grew at villa vanilla

chocolate anyone???
the pod that yummy chocolate comes from

view from villa vanilla
the villa vanilla property was over 200 hectares, this was the view from the back of the farm area

vanilla
beans drying in the run it takes 5 weeks

long wait
waiting to get on the bridge out of quepos

bridge of death
the second bridge we had to go over, no guard rails