We stayed with the Schill family in San Jose for about 5 days while Mateo went to an international remote sensing conference during the first week. We had a great time with their family. Maya and Campbelle (1 yr old baby below) became great buddies!
We spent 3 days lounging around on the Caribbean coast in Puerto Viejo de Limon. This is where we spent many romantic weekends when they lived in Costa Rica. It was different with a baby, but it was a lot of fun. Maya really likes Reggae music, so she fit right in with the Afro-Caribbean culture there.
While in the Puerto Viejo area, Mateo went with Rob Green's family (Rob is a colleague from NASA) to a working organic cacao plantation run by a Swiss family. They arrived in Costa Rica 17 years ago with little chocolate experience -- other than knowing how to eat it. They have incorporated local knowledge, reading from books, and common sense to learn the process of making chocolate. Below are some pictures showing the whole process -- from bean to chocolate.
Step 1: Grow the cacao pod. There are many predators, such as squirrels, oropendola birds, and monkeys. There is also a fungus imported from Ecuador that kills between 10-30% of the crop.
Step 2: Open the pod and take out the white pulp and cacao beans. Then ferment with the pulp for 6 days.
Step 3: Dry the fermented beans for 3-4 days, depending on weather conditions.
Step 4: Roast the beans.
Step 5: Use a rock to break the shells off the cacao beans. Then use a fan to separate the light shells from the heavier bean fragments.
Step 6: Grind the cacao beans into a paste. Too bad the blog doesn't have the ability to transmit smells!
Step 7: Mix the cacao paste with unrefined sugar from local sugar cane.
Step 8: Eat or drink your chocolate!
We had a short visit back to where it all began for us -- the La Selva Biological Station in Sarapiqui. It was too hot and humid for Maya to go out in the forest for long, but we had a great time visiting with many of our friends in the area. Maya got used to being passed around from person to person. She became a real Tica baby.
We spent the day with Isa and Andre from Puerto Rico. Andre is doing a Masters in GIS/Landscape Ecology at CATIE in Turrialba. Our goal was to get to Volcan Poas, but it was shrouded in clouds when we got there. However, it was a great road trip through the little towns up the mountain.
We had a nice dinner in San Jose with Deborah and David Clark, our ecologist friends from La Selva. It was great to get caught up and share our experiences as new parents and to talk about science and academic life.
Maarten, Mateo's ex-jefe from The Nature Conservancy and his wife Marta had us and the Schills over for dinner in Escazu, San Jose. We had a great dinner with arroz con pollo and Argetinean wine! It was a great welcoming dinner!
Posts
