Wednesday 8 March 2023 – All we had to do today was to get ourselves from Aquiares to San Gerardo de Dota, about a three-hour drive. Once there, we could relax for the rest of the day. Simple, no?
Simple, yes. Also, interesting, almost entirely in a good way. Almost.
We had the usual Hacienda breakfast – Gallo Pinto, fried eggs, coffee. We tried the honey-processed coffee for a change and, although it didn’t have the farmyard aroma that so struck Jane, it didn’t frankly have the depth of flavour that we liked.
No matter, we had a nice view as we sat on the terrace overlooking the garden
although the clouds were fairly low. We were joined (at a distance) by three Chacalacas
and I have to say that the fog lent the “Tree of Life” (a Ceiba tree) a very striking appearance as it overlooked the coffee factory.
As we exited the Hacienda to load the car, we heard a real commotion emanating from the trees near the car.
Toucans were gathered and shouting their fool heads off – we don’t know why, but are prepared to bet that it was with evil intent, because they’re bastards. Keel-billed Bastards at that, so we’d at last got reasonably close to them in the wild.
The route we followed started going up in the rather steep fashion that Costa Rican road designers quite frequently favour
but the surface was good and we eventually found ourselves among some really pleasant countryside.
However it soon became clear that we were on a very up-and-downy route, which invariably involves an encounter with a large, heavy and slow lorry, with its consequent tailback.
Under these circumstances, there’s nothing to be done apart from awaiting one’s chance to overtake in due course. We weren’t in a hurry and so it wasn’t too irksome. Once we did get past, we were treated to some lovely views
across what, it was increasingly clear, was agricultural land, with various kinds of materials used (we guessed) as shading for whatever was being grown there.
We passed through the town of Cervantes, which was tight in places
and gave us the chance to appreciate the arcane beauty of the local wiring systems.
We skirted the significant and not particularly attractive conurbation that is Cartago, and joined Route 2, which is the southern segment of the Pan-American Highway (locally in Central America known as the Inter-American Highway) that traverses Costa Rica, and therefore means that there is a significant number of huge trucks among the oncoming traffic. We passed wind turbines as we breasted one hill
and the attractive bits of scenery continued to make the journey interesting and pleasant – certainly the most enjoyable drive whilst we’ve been here, for me.
There’s a local habit of using old satellite dishes as advertising boards which is rather picturesque.
It became clear that we were quite high up in the hills
as we encountered fog from the clouds we were entering.
By this stage, we’d done all but about six miles of the 70-odd mile journey and it had taken us barely over two hours. The reason that the overall journey time would be nearer three hours was soon borne in on us as we turned off the perfectly decent, if somewhat busy Route 2 on to
the trail leading down into the San Gerardo valley. The Pura Aventura materials had prepared us for it to be twisty and steep, but had given us the impression that the road surface was OK.
This was true for about the first mile. Then it became, in places, quite dramatically not true, a state of affairs hardly improved by the driving rain and thick cloud that enveloped us on occasion as we descended with, in at least the driver’s case, buttocks firmly clenched.
There were some great views on offer
but I have to say that I was greatly relieved to get to the bottom with car, dignity and sphincters intact, and to arrive at Lauraceas Lodge and check in.
The sense of relief at survival of those last miles was heightened when we got to our accommodation. It was to be for only one night but it was quite something –
the best (of course!) of 4 cabins, large and roomy and all to ourselves with (praise be!) a kettle and mugs for the making of the well-earned cup of Twinings Earl Grey tea that we awarded ourselves. After a stiff drink and a late lunch at the Lodge restaurant, of course.
So, why, you might reasonably ask, had we subjected ourselves to this final descent? Well, you’d better tune back in tomorrow to find out, hadn’t you?
Tuesday 7 March 2023 – The day held a fully-guided, whole-day programme for us, to learn about the place we were staying – Aquiares; not a Spanish word at all, but from the pre-Columbian native language meaning “the land between rivers”.
The Hacienda set us up with a nice breakfast, with fried eggs and the ubiquitous Gallo Pinto, accompanied by coffee, served in a delightful filter pot.
This was a startling deviation from our usual breakfast fare which is tea, preferably Earl Grey, preferably with milk, because we’re English, so deal with it. Coffee was provided and we never actually felt that asking for tea would be a good idea. Jane, whose nose makes much more of scents that mine does, noticed a strong overtone of farmyard in the aroma of the coffee, which was also served without milk. It was good coffee, but very different from what we would have had mid-morning at home.
And it is coffee that Aquiares is all about as a town, the Hacienda where we were staying is a refurbishment of the farmhouse for the coffee farm, and the day was to be about exploring coffee and Aqiares in more detail. Our guide Wilman, was, as far as locals were concerned, a stranger, since he hailed from Turrialba, a whole 5 miles distant. He gave us a full and intense day, as absorbing, entertaining and educational as our cacao session had been the day before, only much longer, deeper and more intense.
As we left the Hacienda, he bade us note the Ox Cart by its door, specifically its dimensions. Remember this for later.
Then we were taken deep into the coffee plantation. This was possible because it’s huge – 926 hectares, the largest in Costa Rica and so big that it has 82 kilometres of trails in and around it. Our transport was not luxurious, but it was authentic, being one of the trucks used to transport the workers to the coal face.
Wilman disembarks from our “Tour Bus” into the coffee plantation
Since we were among the coffee plants,
Wilman then showed us how to pick coffee. The things you pick are called “cherries” and the idea is that you pick the red ones.
Here’s what Jane and I ended up with after some 20 minutes of picking coffee.
It’s a back -breaking process, and the coffee plantation employs between 800 and 1,000 pickers (about half of whom are itinerants from Nicaragua) to pick the crop over about seven months of the year (July until February, roughly).
After we’d done this, he led us to a picking gang, whose chief was called Antonio
and a picker called Gerard but nicknamed Piggi, who showed us how it was really done.
Experienced pickers like Piggi would collect over thirty baskets every day. Antonio boasted that he once picked 80 baskets in a day (he started as a picker and worked his way up to be a chief, taking responsibility for a team of people picking in a certain area, marshalling them and making sure that the job is done effectively). The working day for a picker starts at 6am and finishes at midday, a siren at the factory sounding loudly (its a massive farm) to mark the beginning and end points.
Wilman also explained the anatomy of a cherry. Inside the skin are two beans, which are covered in pulp, called mucillage (similar in principle to what we saw with cacao yesterday).
The mucillage is sweet and floral and the skin is fruity; these give the final product its distinctive taste. This got us into the topic of varieties. Although all the coffee plants at Aquiares are of the Arabica type, there are varieties within Arabica, each with their own characteristics and quality levels. The finest quality beans are planted high on the hillside, the lower quality ones lower down. So there is a tight control system to make sure that the right plants are seeded in the right place. That said, we found a rogue bush.
This had found its way in through natural processes, and the beans would never get picked for the quality of coffee that was to be produced from that area.
Although the sun wasn’t beating down, the scenery was attractive.
The trees with orange flowers you can see are Poro trees and are important, as they are of the legume family, which means they enrich the soil by fixing nitrogen in it. We could also see Aquiares town, with its coffee factory and church.
We then embarked on a walk, during which we could see the amazing extent of the plantation and the orderliness of the planting.
Wilman also told us about some of the farming methods used to maximise the crop while making the operation sustainable – cutting them back every so often to 60cm high, to increase bushiness;
planting new crops to replace older ones after about 25 years;
Young coffee plants
Mature coffee plants to same scale
and sometimes planting two close together so they compete to grow more cherries.
On the way, this being Costa Rica, we saw plenty of birds – vultures
and a Black Hawk
as well as many birds too small for me to photograph (I left my Big Lens behind for the day).
We descended further and further, past rainbow eucalyptus trees
which are not endemic but have been planted because they take moisture out of the soil and thus mitigate any rotting of the coffee plants, and also provide essential oils for creating other, non-coffee products.
Down and down we went
until we emerged at one of the rivers that give Aquiares its name.
There’s a waterfall there that even an Icelander might consider to be worthy of the name.
There are a lot of boulders and stones in the area
and Wilman told us that the previous July there had been so much rain – twice as much as the average rainfall for the whole month fell in one day – that the river actually changed course. It used to run behind the diagonal line of bushes you see beyond the boulders in the middle of the picture. All of the rocks had been moved there by the sheer volume and weight of water during that rainfall. That must have been an impressive sight!
We toiled back up the slope to the Hacienda for a nice lunch – chicken, rice and beans! – and then Wilman took us on to part 2 of the day – a visit to the coffee factory and the village of Aquiares.
Aquiares was founded in the 1890s by farmers looking to take advantage of Costa Rica´s railroad to the port of Limón. An English family, the Lindos, acquired it in the early 1900s and built houses in the village and around the plantation, to house the workers and to attract more into the area. There are still some of the original houses there
as well as buildings that were the original theatre and supermarket.
Originally the theatre
The old supermarket
In order to qualify as a village, and also to support the incoming workers, who were largely Catholic, the Lindo family also imported a church.
The aluminium shell came from Belgium, the clock from Germany, the wood for the interior from Italy. There was some repair work going on – indeed, the church seemed to be supported by prayer alone –
and therefore it was open and we were able to take a look inside.
But the main thrust of the afternoon was to see round the factory, which turned out to be quite a brain-boggling visit, both from its scale and the variety of coffees it deals with.
It’s a big place
overlooked by the “Tree of Life”
from which the coffee farm takes its logo.
Coffee, Community and Conservation are three important things to the farm – conservation because 75% of the plantation is given over to coffee plants, but the other 25% is forest and trees which are not only the basis for the company’s conservation efforts but also make the entire operation carbon negative – it produces more oxygen than CO2. The farm is also part of the Rainforest Aliance.
Wilman took us through the process of taking the picked cherries and turning them into beans to be shipped all over the world, both with a view of the original processes and also of the modern ones, which involve all sorts of conduits, feeds and sophisticated machinery for sorting the beans by quality and size.
The vast majority – 85% – of the cherries go through a process called “fully washed”, where beans are deposited into silos
(note that the green hopper is exactly the same size as the ox cart outside the Hacienda, which was originally used to transport the cherries or beans).
From here the cherries are flushed along with water, and are sorted as part of the washing process – poor quality cherries sink, good quality cherries go on to have the pulp and mucilage mechanically removed before ending up in a huge drier
and then are stored in silos as part of the maturation process.
Then the beans are sorted in various ways (by density, weight, size and colour)
and end up in sacks – white for lower quality, brown for higher quality.
You’ve been paying attention, so you’ll know that there are still 15% of the beans unaccounted for. Well done. I have to say that by this stage in the day my brain was definitely begging for mercy as Wilman threw more and more complexities into the mix.
The 15% that are not “fully washed” may go through one of several small batch processes: “natural” where whole cherries are laid out and dried by the heat of the sun
Today’s cherries in the foreground, older ones behind it
Fermented cherries in the foregound
(in case of no sun – like today; it was raining outside – there’s a hot air blower, driven by a furnace fired by excavated old coffee plants,
as part of the sustainability aspects of the operation). Retaining the pulp gives fruity notes to the finished product.
The “honey” process involves drying the beans with their mucilage covering which gives honeyed and floral notes.
The beans may be fermented, either in their own mucilage or added molasses or even kefir, and the various different varieties are treated in a variety of different ways. The number of combinations is bewildering but there are basically four coffee varieties and three treatments that form most of the company’s output. More details about the operation, the history and the credentials can be found on the company’s website, of course. My brain was begging for mercy by this point; having tried to understand the complexities of cacao yesterday, absorbing those of fine coffee today was proving a bit too much.
But the general lesson is clear – chocolate and coffee are as subtle, varied and complex as wine. The coffee we had at breakfast at the Hacienda was a Centroamericano variety, made by the Natural process. It will be interesting to get back home and try our usual coffee to see if all this education has had any effect at all.
So, foot- and brainsore, we headed back to the Hacienda, past a view of the factory and its coffee drying greenhouses
and some of the colourful houses in the village,
including one which I have to say I would find exceedingly annoying were I to live here.
However, I don’t, so it’s none of my bleedin’ business.
We took a light supper at the Hacienda and eventually headed for bed in slightly eerie circumstances – the Hacienda staff had gone home and we were the only guests. We had the whole place to ourselves and it felt really quite odd. This was also the second day without either gin or Earl Grey tea, which contributed further to the other-worldliness of the experience. But we surived, and slept well in preparation for moving on the next day.
The morrow should be pretty dull. We simply have to move on to our next destination, San Gerardo de Dota. What can possibly go wrong?
Monday 6 March 2023 – All we had to do today was to get from Puerto Viejo to Aquiares, a three-and-a-half hour drive – eventually. We had, however, an intriguing break to the journey; a visit to the Nortico Cacao Farm, near Turrialba. “Mmmmm”, we thought. “Chocolate”, we thought. How little we knew….
Breakfast at the villas was as good as it had been the previous day, and we were able to get on the road in good time, but in very wet and murky conditions. The drive was fundamentally OK, but took us back to the ghastliness that is Route 32. Yes; the one with the roadworks, which is even less charismatic in the rain. It’s obviously an important route, since it leads from Limón, a major port, to San José, the capital.
The bit we had to do was from Limón to Siquirres (a town we childishly kept calling Squirrels)
which is the section with the roadworks. And the ghastly industrial bits
and, erm, Liverpool.
Seems strange to find such a famous UK place name in Costa Rica.
We ground it out without serious incident and then turned off in the direction of Turrialba, at which point it was clear that (a) we were going into the mountains, and (b) the mountains were largely shrouded in cloud.
Waze led us along yet another daunting path, with one tense moment involving someone coming the other way fortunately resolved in our favour, to arrive at Nortico
slightly early for lunch. This enabled a reasonably well-needed bathroom break, which gave me the first insight that the visit here was not going to be dull. This plaque was on the wall of the loo.
We met Aldo, the Tico part of “Nortico”. His wife, Ann-Elin, is Norwegian, which explains the other part. From the start it was clear that his passion and knowledge of his specialist subject and his joy at communicating it matched and even exceeded that of Miguel “Monkey” at Tortuga Lodge. He made us feel at ease, arranged coffee for us, prepared in a very traditional way,
gave us chocolate and then provided lunch (chicken, rice and beans!) before two other couples (one French, one German) turned up for the main event – a deep, swift and brain-boggling immersion into the complexities of cacao, which I had thought was a pretty straightforward fruit with a pretty well-understood story. How wrong I was….
Aldo presided over a hugely entertaining session of discussion, education and interaction
on the general subject of cacao: its history (found first in Amazonia, first cultivated in Mexico and Mesoamerica); which countries you can find it in (all around the equator); which country produces the most (Ivory Coast, though not in a sustainable way); and its quality and varieties (in vast numbers). This was where we began to understand the complexities around cacao – there are an enormous number of varieties, only 5% of which are of top quality – “fine flavour”. This 5% excludes all of the bulk cacao production, which therefore means any chocolate from any chocolate maker you’ve ever heard of. Except maybe one or two.
Cacao and the production of chocolate has many similarities with the complexities of grape varieties and wine. There are many, many varieties of grape, there are many sorts of wine, but only a very small percentage of wines could be described as fine wine. Much knowledge of grape cultivation and vinification is needed to produce the top quality wines and the same is true for cacao and chocolate. The Nortico Farm has settled on just eight varieties of cacao to cultivate and use for chocolate. They have been carefully selected not only for their individual aroma and taste characteristics, but also because they will not cross-pollinate, so each variety remains pure. It’s a small operation – just four hectares – but operated with loving attention to detail in the growing, picking and processing of cacao into the various types of chocolate that Nortico sells.
Whilst Aldo was explaining all of this, he was also passing round samples of the various types of chocolate for the six of us to taste. He introduced Anna-Laura to us, the third person in the business beside Aldo and Ann-Elin
Anna-Laura and Aldo, who is displaying his 2023 Excellence in Cacao Award
and Anna-Laura had the pleasure of taking us out into the rain to explain about growing and processing cacao.
“Sistema Mixto” involved not growing cacao plants intensively, but interspersed with banana plants which provide necessary shade for the cacao plants, extra nutrients in the soil and produce to sell whilst waiting for the cacao plants to mature.
The cacao fruits come in a variety of colours
and the colours depict either the variety of cacao or the maturity of each fruit. So you kind of have to know what you’re doing when picking – fruits don’t all mature at the same time, so those on the same branch will be at differing stages of growth.
We’d been to a chocolate factory elsewhere so we were familiar with the structure of the fruit – a shell, with seeds inside, each coated with a pulp (surprisingly sweet-tasting).
Once picked, the seeds and pulp are put into a kind of solera fermenting system;
they start at the top and progress, over the course of a couple of days, down to the bottom, with fermentation being sped along by the sweetness of the pulp. The resulting seeds are then spread out to dry, if possible in the heat of the sun
or, if wet, assisted (in this case by a solar-power driven heater)
and sorted (by hand!) to pick out and discard the seeds which have not fermented properly and which will not contribute to fine chocolate.
Whilst Anna-Laura was explaining this, Aldo was setting up the next phase of the experience. He equipped everyone with some dried seeds
which were still covered in in a shell-like skin which had to be split off.
The bowl contains the beans, or nibs, which go on to be the basis for chocolate – the skins or shells can be used for compost.
Then the nibs have to be ground into a paste.
This paste has the cacao butter in it which many manufacturers actually extract at this point and replace with something like palm oil; cacao butter is a valuable product which can be profitably sold elsewhere, for example into the cosmetics industry. This is another thing that marks out fine chocolate from the rabble that you and I normally buy and eat.
Then we each took our portion of paste and added ingredients to taste – milk (powdered milk only, the fat in liquid milk interferes with the final taste), sugar, ginger, salt, cinnamon and so forth, plus water
such that you end up with a lovely, flavoursome ball of your own, private and unique blend of chocolate.
Guess which bundle is Jane’s and which is mine….
Obviously the hand-ground paste we were using was much coarser and the process much simplified over their actual manufacture, but the principles are the same.
The whole process was accompanied by much laughter to leaven the serious messages about quality of raw materials and of processing to produce something very fine. The Nortico products are not available in your average shop; maybe a gourmet market in Costa Rica might stock their product and possibly a restaurant or two. Aldo gave us an opportunity to buy some, obvs,
and so we did, including some nibs, which will go very nicely on the breakfast muesli.
The whole session was massively educational, very thought-provoking and hugely enjoyable, It’s a joy to see someone in action with such a passion and an ability to communicate it. We left with several bars of chocolate and brains spinning with the enormous amount of information that Aldo had tried to inject into them.
It was time to get back on the road, for a short drive to our final destination – Casa Hacienda La Esperanza in Aquiares, where we stay for a couple of nights. The Hacienda is a refurbished farmhouse originally over 100 years old, and is a lovely place
with a fine garden
and a terrace where we took coffee, as prepared and dispensed in a very pleasing manner.
Note the lovely coffee pot in the foreground
Our room is, engagingly, called Toucan.
We had a fine dinner – tuna steak with vegetables and yuca – before settling in for the night.
The morrow offers the prospect of an education experience similar to today’s in that I suspect that we’ll learn huge amounts about a product which is a great deal more complex and nuanced than we could have possibly expected. So come back soon and find out more, eh?
