Adventures in the City

Where we get our drinking water

We’ve been in San Jose, the capitol of Costa Rica, for the last couple of days.

What a vacation! When we are at the farm it is almost impossible to imagine a life that doesn’t involve early rising, hard work, way too many projects and endless discussions about the best way to do things (discussions that I usually lose!)
The first day here in town we stayed in bed till 10 AM, watched a movie, read and generally lazed around. It felt a little bit like winning the lottery.

Yesterday we visited the Om Prem Pilates/Gyrotonic studio in San Jose. It is a beautiful, fun place that was very happy to see Keli who can offer them her services as a Gyrotonic master trainer. Its great for us because it gives us a kind of home away from home and a great way to connect with people here in town.

The clients of this studio are just the kind of people who would appreciate a visit to the Chocolate Farm. They can do yoga and Gyrotonic, refresh themselves with the pure country atmosphere and eat lots of chocolate.

San Jose is just like any other big city. It is modern, fast paced, and stressful. When they travel a couple of hundred miles south to our farm they are also traveling back in time, to a place where life is more simple, people still grow most of their own food and live in rhythms dictated by the sun, moon and seasons.

Today we traveled to Finmac, an inelegant name for an amazing cacao plantation, owned by Hugo Hermelink. 110 hectares of cacao trees. All of them are grafted trees, so they look a lot different than ours, which are planted from seeds. The grafted trees have slimmer trunks and don’t grow as high. They almost look like bonsai cacao compared to ours. The beans are very uniform in taste, even a little bland when compared to our spicy, fruity and all-over-the-place criollo beans but when you are running a big business, uniform is good.

We had a very interesting tour from the plantation manager, Ivan. I was especially interested in their fermentation process since this is the make or break point in the chocolate making process. They use large boxes, about 4 foot by 3 foot by 2 foot high, that concentrate the heat created by the fermentation. It seems like a lot of manpower is needed because all those beans need to get shoveled from box to box every day - this mixes up the beans and ensures that all the beans are fermented equally.

Hugo has some industrial sized machinery that heats, cracks, winnows and conches the beans. He produces his own cocoa liquor which he then ships around the world. This cocoa liquor is the raw material for making chocolate when added to sugar and cacao butter.

The final tasty portion of the tour was when we entered the small house where seven women in white lab coats and hair nets were making chocolate bars with Hugo’s cocoa liquor. Hugo was instrumental in helping to set up this small collective of women from the neighboring village. They take the liquor, melt it, add sugar and flavoring (ginger, mint, cinnamon, cappuccino, and others) temper it and pour it into molds.

We happened to come in when they were gathered around the table wrapping the bars by hand.  Of course Keli bought many bars from them and considers it a substitute to offer friends in CA because we are not planning on making chocolate this visit.  The bars were very good.

On the way back we stopped off at one of the several waterfalls coming down the pristine mountains and filled our water jug. Waterfalls are always the high point of Keli’s day and drinking the water straight from the falls is one of our favorite hobbies. 

We leave for California in the morning.  Keli will be in Miami for a few days and I go straight into a Diamond Heart retreat with lots of material for inquiry.  So this is the end of this chapter. We anticipate an uneventful restful visit, but know that it will probably be full of more crazy adventure.