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.

1,000 New Cacao Trees

The cacao goddess is after us!


We found that we had no choice except to plant 1,000 new cacao trees. Even though we are trying to complete building a house and take care of the million other details involved in running a finca in Costa Rica, it just had to happen...

The seeds germinate easily, they have a lot of "potencia," as it is called here. All we had to do was buy the bags where the seeds will spend the first three months of their lives, build a shade structure, dig up a lot of beautiful dirt and mix it with the "gallinaza," which is chicken poop mixed in with rice husks, arrange for somebody to fill the bags and keep them watered and that's it! Simple...

I'm trying to upload a video of the shade structure being built but it seems to be a strain on the internet connection. Maybe later...

An Avalanche of Activity

First of all, I should say that it is completely insane to be blogging right now. We are leaving the farm tomorrow and, as always, there is too much to do.

Life has a way of sweeping us up in its path and all we can do is say yes.  For example, we have been preparing to plant 1,000 cacao trees. Our neighbor, Dianey, saw what we are doing and became interested in planting some of his own. So we talked to the biggest cacao producer in Costa Rica, Hugo Hemerlink, to find out what price he would pay for organic beans. When Dianey heard the price (more than twice what we are receiving now as the beans are sold into the conventional market,) he immediately thought of involving many more neighbors and starting a collective.

So now we find ourselves in the middle of the process of organizing the local farmers into a collective, building a new drying rack and figuring out how to do large scale, high quality fermentation.

At the same time, we are making chocolate here to bring back to the States. We made two batches, one from beans we bought in San Jose and one from our own beans. The beans from San Jose made fine chocolate but the beans from our own farm had such a rich diversity of taste - the taste was brighter and more colorful.

And then disaster struck! We opened the refrigerator door after letting the chocolate chill and it was suffering from bloom - big time! The worst case we ever saw.

It was a mystery. My best guess is that the fridge had been defrosting and the humidity in the fridge was too high.

Luckily, it is possible to melt the chocolate and bring it back to its original dark and glossy state. So, we’ve been staying up late, melting chocolate, pouring it back into the molds and crossing our fingers as we wait for it to chill.

We did not temper either batch so it means that we need to keep it chilled all the way to the United States. That is going to be a real challenge.

Another big shift that is going on now is that we are looking at selling lots on the Chocolate Farm.  As we walked the property with our real estate agent we realized once again what a special piece of property we are living on. But if we want to sell land, we need to get it surveyed, we have to get it registered, talk to lawyers, etc….

The way we both feel is that we are pushing ourselves right up to our limits all the time. In fact, it is the furthest possible thing from the stereotypical idea of a tropical paradise, lounging in a hammock with a daiquiri and paperback in hand.

Taking care of land out here is hard work. We are only now, after two years, beginning to understand what a difficult job we have undertaken.

We had to laugh a few weeks ago when we met a guy who has been looking for land for six months in Costa Rica. He told us that he finally realized that he wasn’t ready for the responsibility of taking care of a big piece of land - by which he meant 10 acres!

We have almost a hundred acres here and sometimes it seems that almost every square foot of it needs special attention.

In fact, this process of living a life in the countryside of Costa Rica has been one of the most intense growth processes of my life. There was a time two weeks ago when I got sick with bronchitis and a weird skin infection. Normally, I never get sick. The doctor said it was stress. Normally, I don’t feel stressed.

I went to bed for a couple of days after I got that diagnosis. I read, watched movies and tried to rest. But I felt so overwhelmed with all that needed to be done that I almost felt as though I was going through a physical breakdown in order to retreat from all the demands of life. I felt something growing inside me - something like a backbone or a strong inner core that is developing in order to deal with these new challenges.

See you in California!