Tag Archives: Costa Rica

Day 17 – Aquiares – Fully Washed or Natural?

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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?

Day 16 – Puerto Viejo to Aquiares – Choc full of passion and joy

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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?

Day 15 – Puerto Viejo II – Rescue, Recovery, Refresh

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Sunday 5 March 2023 – Nearly half way through our holiday in travels around Costa Rica, and we have now finished the first of our two bags of Twinings Earl Grey tea.

For breakfast, Eric was front of house and presided over a really very good breakfast, probably the best we’ve had during our time in Costa Rica.  It set us up for an absorbing day, visiting two places, each dedicated to helping the local wildlife, each in its quite different way.

The first visit was to the Jaguar Rescue Centre. This is a temporary or permanent home for ill, injured and orphaned animals. With a focus on monkeys, sloths, other mammals, birds and reptiles, the JRC provides veterinary services, round-the-clock care and comfort to animals that would otherwise be unable to survive in the rainforest or the waters of the Caribbean. It has quite a remit, since it is obliged to accept and take care of any animal brought to it that is sick or injured. The Rescue Centre provides the veterinary services, 24-hour care, and comfort to animals; the Sanctuary is the permanent home, where the best possible conditions and care are offered to those animals that cannot be released back to nature due to their physical conditions. The Rescue Centre typically handles over 800 animals a year and has cared for over 5,000.  If I understood correctly, they are currently providing care for some 492 creatures in all.

A remarkable place, with a wonderful, caring attitude; and, because of its stock-in-trade, some sad stories of injured, ill or abused animals that can never be released back into the wild.  We took plenty of photos there, and some of them are not what you might call great wildlife photos because of the conditions that the animals have to live in – not free to return to the wild, for their own good or the greater good of other wildlife. But here they are anyway, to show you some of the range of animals currently in care.

For example, they have two wonderful scarlet macaws, which were kept (illegally) as pets and so could not survive if they were released. Wonderful creatures, but impossible to get good photos.

There are some owls, a spectacled owl

and a black-and-white owl,

who has lost an eye probably due to the superstitious belief that owls are harmful creatures, so people often throw stones at them.

There’s a very cute two-toed sloth

which actually suffers from dwarfism and so couldn’t survive naturally.

There’s an American crocodile which has lost an eye,

some slider turtles,

and a caiman

which is in the same enclosure as the turtles, but apparently has jaws too small to present a threat to them (probably all ex-pets). There was also an agouti there – nothing to do with the centre, it had just found its way in naturally and was quite happily cohabiting with the other animals.

They have spider monkeys each with their own, often sad, story.

They have Amazonian parrakeets

and they gave us our first chance to see a keel-billed toucan at close quarters.

(A beautiful creature, but, like all toucans, a nasty piece of work – they have been described as the most vicious predator in Costa Rica.)

My vote for the most beautiful animal there is

the margay.  I think it had been kept (illegally) as a pet but had escaped and slaughtered thirty of a neighbour’s chickens before eating only one of them.

On the subject of cats, it is apparently difficult to tell the difference between margay, jaguar and ocelot when they are kittens.  The very first creature brought to the centre was a young kitten which actually turned out to be an ocelot, but they initially thought it was a jaguar, hence they called the centre the Jaguar Rescue Centre, even though there are not and never have been any jaguars there.

Our other activity today was to visit the Ara Project at Manzanillo. This is a conservation programme dedicated to saving the critically-endangered great green macaw. Having found the place, which was up quite an alarming drive from the road, we had a chance to read the information boards about the work the foundation is doing, followed by an introductory chat from Marcelo,

who explained a few more details about the life cycle of the birds and the problems they face from predators (e.g. toucans, which predate the chicks, the bastards) and loss of habitat (particularly the forest almond, whose wood is extremely hard and therefore sought after for, e.g. housebuilding). When the centre was set up, there were no green macaws in the area, but now there are over 100 who come and go as they please.  The foundation have set up some nesting boxes (fashioned around plastic dustbins, actually) which provide a safe haven for the birds and make it a little easier to check up on the success of breeding.

There was some excitement even before we were taken to the viewing area as some macaws came by.

and then we went up to an elevated spot from where it was easy to see some stations set up with “snacks” for the birds to tempt them to come by.

I didn’t expect to have any problems getting some fine photos of macaws as they perched in the surrounding trees, and indeed it wasn’t difficult.

What I really wanted to achieve were some shots of the birds in flight.  This was less easy.  I could get them at a distance

but getting close-up action shots of them was very difficult.  I took around 450 images, over half of which I would immediately discard for being out of focus, poorly framed or even not including any macaws at all.  Here is a gallery of some of the less-unacceptable results (Jane maintains that the last of these is actually a photo of an angel…)

Whilst all this was going on, someone pointed out that there was actually a sizeable two-toed sloth in the trees above us, and this provided a bit of a diversion.

Jane got a real Chewbacca shot of it,

and I took some video as it (relatively speaking) sprinted about the branches.

Anyhoo, back to the macaws.  There was a nesting box visible from the viewing area

which seemed to be of passing interest to a couple of the birds, but whether it was actually in use or not I don’t know.

I guess this is the best shot of the session from my point of view – the nearest to what I’d visualised as possible and which also shows why they are called green macaws.

 

That was it for Parrots Of The Caribbean, and it was time to go.  Also, it had started to rain (actually, we’d been lucky with the weather today – it rained for much of it, but not while we were out).

It was time for a late lunch/early dinner, and Jane had spotted a restaurant near the Ara Project called El Refugio (Facebook page here).  It was there I noticed another characteristic of the Caribbean area of Costa Rica:

cats.  This was the only area of the country that we’d so far seen where there were cats; everywhere else it was dog-only.  That’s not to say that the restaurant was cat-only

as two examples of the local tamelife came to inspect our meals.  Their luck was out, but ours was in – the food there was very good indeed.

The journey back to our villa was therefore in twilight, which was a bit daunting,

as the local cyclists, of which there were very many, it being a Sunday, don’t seem to think it necessary to have lights on their bikes. Still, we made it without knocking any of them over, at least as far as we could tell in the half-light, and that was it for the day.

The morrow sees us move on to our next port of call, which is shaping up to showcase a very different aspect of Costa Rican life, so do please come back to these pages to see where we ended up next.