A week in chocolate

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It has become apparent we are bad at travelling. Despite crystal clear directions and a large signpost we happily sailed past our destination. An hour and a half later we were made to leave the bus in darkness, and after conversing in the worst spanish possible we figured out someone was coming to get us. After sitting on an ancient chicken bus for hours as it crawled along the mountainous wilderness the prospect of a car was rather appealing. Alas, the two headlights coming to rescue us belonged to a pair of off road bikes. Turning up at night, hours late on the back of bikes with our rucksacks was not the first impression we were hoping for but lots of fun.

Making chocolate is painful and messy as is learning spanish...

The Chocolate Making Process
Harvesting - a walk down slippery slopes, crossing a river sat behind someone on a horses bum and crawling up slippery slopes at the farm in the rain, smacking coco beans with machetes whilst being attacked by every insect in the vicinity and just generally falling over.
Fermenting beans - shovelling piles of rotting, pungent ant ridden beans.
Raking and drying - the beans enjoy the gorgeous hot morning sunshine and have to be turned with the worlds longest wooden rake.
Roasting and peeling - hot, slow and painful.
Making chocolate - the easy bit!

Despite chocolate being the primary concern we also found time to visit the swimming hole in the river, fall over, break shoes, see lots of wildlife, relax in hammocks, play with the dogs, milk cows and have real costa rican fiestas. Its not a real Costa Rican fiesta without either a cassette player/mobile phone tunage, and oaty hot chocolate/questionmark fermented fruit drink. Our kind of party.

As we were staying in a family home it was important to keep up with the cleaning, costa rican style. We did however struggle with the translation and the concept of putting foam mattresses on the roof...

Having arrived as idiots, we left our week of education as idiots who had gained a few pounds in weight, dirt, insect bites and the odd spanish word. Week well spent!

iHasta la pasta!

p.s. Emily would like to inform everyone that she still has a thumb disability that oppresses her life because Lexie has heard about it enough and still dosent care.

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