After camping on a couple beaches on the Nicoya Penninsula, we trekked our way high up into the mountains of the Pacific Slope, to a small villiage of about 140 people called Mastatal. A town with a a school, a bar and two tiendas, no grocery or bank or hardware store, the nearest town where you can find these things 2 hours away. A place where the bus passes through only once a day, where only a couple people have trucks, and most ride motor bikes that they can`t take out of the town because they don`t have a license.
We came here to work on a cacao farm called La Iguana Chocolate, learning the process of turning cacao into chocolate. We thought we came at the time to help with the harvest, but the pods won`t be ready for another couple months. We took fermented and dried beans, roasted them on a fire in the yard in a big metal bowl, stirring with a wooden plank; we cracked the shells by hand (which causes a big thumb blister); we ground the beans on an old metal crank grinder - often breaking a sweat - ground them again and again until the final product was fine enough to make cocoa powder or to add flavor and cocoa butter for making deliscious little pieces of chocolate. We also ate brownies and chocolate banana milkshakes.
The family that owns and lives on the farm are wonderful Costa Ricans, whom we got to know very well and got really comfortable with. They have a lot of beautiful space perched in the hills, with horses, chickens, cows, dogs and a cat the dogs wish to eat. We woke up with the sun, to moos and cockadoodledoos, and slept through thunder and lighting every night.
After working we played a lot of foosball (or getting whooped by Jaun Luis the dad), spent time in the villiage getting to know the locals at the pulperìa, and spent a Sunday afternoon watching the men of the family playing soccer against other villiages, on their team Los Galacticos.
We milked the cows a couple times, much more difficult than I imagined, but quite an experience. It`s not just yanking! There`s a finess that really gives you a hand cramp.
We also came up with a solution to the family`s huge trash problem. There`s no garbage service in Mastatal, so if it`s trash that can`t be burned, it either piles up on the property, or is sent on the bus to Puriscal for dump for a fee. At La Iguana there`s two years worth of plastic bottles and random garbage piling up, so we told them about a plastic bottle constructed wall we saw on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. You take plastic bottles, stuff them as densely as possible with the rest of trash like plastic bags and non recyclable materials, then essentially use the heavy bottles as bricks using cement to finish it off to build walls, or even a house as we`ve seen pictures of online. The family got
really excited over this, even Lidiette the mom was out there stuffing garbage into bottles with us. What to do with the garbage has always been an important topic. We took about 10 sacos (kind of like a potato sack, about the size of a large garbage bag) of trash and compacted it all into 2 sacos full of plastic bottles. With 4 people working on it it took us about 2 work days. We couldn`t stay long enough to see the experiment wall constructed, but with all of the excitement over the idea, I know that it will be beneficial to the farm and the villiage, and hope that they will have future volunteers on the project.
On one day a guy who works with the family on getting the volunteers out there took us on a 13 km hike to the next town, an indigenous villiage called Zapatòn. We stopped along the way at friends` homes, having coffee or just taking a break from the hike. One family built cabañas to bring in extra money from tourists who come to the mountains for La Congreja National Park, and I took pictures and agreed to help them set up a website to get the info out there. Another family served us huge plates of rice and beans for lunch, just because they knew we must be hungry. I photographed indigenous artifacts for documentation for the villiage, and drawings school children had made of local medicinal plants for postcards. Eventually the rain came, like every afternoon, and we hitched back in a electric company`s truck, stopping to hear customer complaints along the way.
Srangely enough, there was a group from UW at another ranch in Mastatal, and we met two girls from Tacoma, one of whom we vaguely remembered from Mason. What a small crazy world.
So now we`re at a beach on the Pacific side of the mainland, called Uvita, where it`s not touristy at all really, and the town and where we`re camping is about a 20 minute walk from the beach, which is in a national park (which you`re supposed to pay an entrance fee for, but they told us how to get in without paying). The place we`re staying at is a hostel kind of thing, and the last couple nights we were overrun by a group from Arcadia University who made it feel like a rowdy college dorm. Now they`re gone and we have the hammocks and pool table to ourselves.
I won`t be able to upload pics until we get to San Jose on the 6th.
Here we have pictures from our time at La Iguana Chocolate. Above is yet another ruined church, in Puriscal - the closest main town two hours from the farm.
A cocoa pod, which holds the soft white beans that you can chew and suck on for a nice fruity flavor.
Grinding chocolate.
Long-Billed Hermit hummingbird (we IDed it from an animal book they had at the farm, which we also used to ID venomous and false/venemous snakes, green poison arrow frogs and other jungle creatures) which wasn`t shy at all, as it sat on that branch while I shot it for a good ten minutes, with flash!
The babies make it look easy.
Notice the concentration.
Long sweaty hike in the mountains.
Look at that stream!
Drying walnuts.
The color my shoes are now stained.
some kind of fruit squash
The majestic mango tree.
My toes on a regular day.
Spreading out the rice to dry.
An artifact from Zapatòn.
Plastic bottle wall, just cover with cement.
