Advertisement
Published: December 8th 2011
Gulf of Nicoya
Viewpoint on the way to the farmSo the time has arrived where we are changing projects. Our extended weekend was absolutely amazing as the adventure part really started in here in Monteverde! It was finally a beautiful day in the area and so many less rain clouds that we were able to actually see Arenal Volcano!
After arriving back from La Fortuna we got dropped off at the Hotel Montelena where we were once again greeted by the very friendly staff. We waited for our ride Olivier and said our goodbye to Amy. We got into the microbus with Olivier and as we expected he spoke only Spanish. He was nice enough to stop along the way at a couple of viewpoints. The second was the highlight as we were about 250 ft above the farm valley looking down at the farm and across to the Gulf of Nicoya, such a spectacular viewpoint! Olivier then dropped us at our home stay where we met our new house family, Macho and Tema. Leanne was nice enough to give us a quick tour of the local farm. Our farm was quite close to Leanne´s home stay as we walked through the crops and barn area. Liz got caught
Que Bonita!
The view from our room on the farm up with one of the cows and just so happened to take a video while it was doing its business... great start to the farm activities!
We settled into our room and headed down the hill to Oldemar´s farm (where all the coffee action happens). The walk was about five minutes down hill but just over ten minutes on the way back... a pretty rough go especially with the wind and slanted rain (memories of Bruce county weather)! We were introduced to Oldemar´s wife and son Juan and the volunteer who was staying with them Bennett. He gave us a quick tour of the farm grounds, showing us the fresh fruit, sugar cane trees and of course the coffee! We relaxed for the remainder of the afternoon as we waited for Oldemar to get back from his work out in the mountains. Just as we were leaving Oldemar walked in and we made the brief introductions. An uneventful day but we were excited to start our work at 8am the next morning.
The next morning our walk to Oldemar´s farm was amazing... the edge of the mountain tops were filled with clouds, the sun was shining in the
Machete
Chris peeling an orange with a machete distance and right in front of us the rainbow was beautiful! The colours were full and the entire rainbow could almost be seen. The morning tasks involved some manual labour on the farm, this included planting new trees and removing old ones. It was rather laborous but the four of us (Leanne, Liz, Juan and I) managed to plant about 40 new trees and remove about a dozen dead ones. Removing the old ones proved to be quite the task as some of these trees had deep and thick roots, up to 2 inches thick and a foot deep! We were able to accomplish all this just in the morning... we broke and headed back to our home stay for lunch.
This afternoon was probably the highlight of the volunteering thus far. The four of us continued to help around the farm by roasting, grinding and packaging coffee! This was so much fun, the machinery used to roast the beans was so basic... a tumbler for the beans, heat source (propane), a motor to axially rotate the tumbler and a catch basin that was manually spun to cool the beans! The whole process only took about 25 minutes to
Orange
Liz enjoying a freshly picked orange roast medium beans and 30 minutes for dark.
After the roasting and cooling it was time to package the whole beans, a very simple process by weighing out 300 grams, placing in plastic bag and sealing for freshness! Some of the beans were reserved .And as there was about 130 grams left over this was taken inside, freshly ground and brewed for our treat... what a delicious treat, we have never tasted such great coffee! At that moment it was decided some of this coffee needed to be purchased.
Thursday morning we were supposed to do more roasting however there was a scheduled power outage from 8 am to 2 pm so Oldemar made the executive decision that we would all be doing tree planting and removal in the plantation again. This time there were 8 of us in total and even though there were not enough tools for everyone it was a successful day. We broke about halfway through the morning for a fruit snack: freshly picked oranges from the tree! As there were no kicthen utensils out in the plantation the machete was required to peel the oranges (check out the picture!) Using an 16 inch knife
Oldemar
The coffee farm proprieter giving directions to peel a baseball sized orange is quite difficult! I was told it takes time to master the use of the machete for peeling purposes however chopping down branches and clear cutting the bush, no problem! Our morning was summed up with a brief game of machete baseball!
We came back after lunch to try our hand at coffee picking. The farm was not quite ready to be picked as the picking season usually commences mid December however there were still a number of trees with numerous beans ready to picked. In short, the picking process was just OK... kind of boring actually! However we did come across a large wasp nests in one tree, so that tree was avoided!
Friday morning was our last day on the farm and our last day of volunteering 😞 We woke up to a delicious breakfast of fried empanadas filled with farm fresh cheese and sides of watermelon and pineapple. As we were told yeseterday that there was no work on Oldemar´s farm we stayed with our home stay on their farm... first task of the day, milk the cow! Seriously we had to milk the family cow, such an interesting
Coffee Roasting
Fresh-roasted coffee - yum. experience but rather easy... the hardest part was actually pulling the young calf away from her mother! After Liz and I each took a turn, Macho finished up and then we were off to help plant seeds and fertilize their local garden. We planted lettuce seeds (so tiny), fertilized the cilantro, and also all the young miscellaneous fruit trees; naranja, limon, maracuya, etc. We finished early and decided we had enough time to head for the infamous and widely viewed San Luis waterfalls. The mostly uphill, winding and slippery trek was a bit more trecherous than we expected, however we made it and were extremely pleased. The waterfall is nestled deep in the Monteverde rainforest and the beauty is worth the hike! The 100 meter waterfall twists in an "S" shape and cascades down into the basin pool... definitely the most beautiful waterfall we have seen to date! We headed back to the farm, packed our bags and said our goodbyes.
The day ended up to be quite long as the supposed 4 hour trip home actually took almost 6.5 hours. We traversed down through the Monterverde hills and saw an amazing rainbow in full! That was the highlight...
Coffee Picking
Liz dressed up and ready to go! however as we exited the next closest town we heard a thud from the bus, then smoke, then the screeching halt of the bus. We all got out to look around and found nothing wrong... I then looked under the bus and saw the problem. A piece of what looked like the driveshaft to the rear axle had completely broken off and was now sitting on the road; this bus wasnt going anywhere! To our surprise we only waited 30 minutes for the first bus however our next bus was a bit longer. In short the journey was much longer and extremely tiresome. We finally made it home, had dinner and crashed!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.074s; Tpl: 0.015s; cc: 9; qc: 47; dbt: 0.0466s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Nadeem
non-member comment
Amazing pictures
You look experienced with machete Chris, you kept all of your fingers right? :P. Good to read that you guys are having a great trip! Look forward to reading more.