Day 321: Chocolate in Antigua

So today was the big travel day: my mum caught a flight back home, and an hour later I boarded a plane to Guatemala City. Somehow I ended up with a business class ticket - I'm not quite sure how that happened, since I'd simply bought the cheapest ticket available... but I enjoyed the added comfort anyway ;-) At the airport in Guatemala City, everybody was really friendly - a nice contrast to the somewhat grumpy security personnel in San Jose. Immigration and customs were over quickly, and very soon I sat in a shuttle to Antigua Guatemala.

After checking into my hostel in Antigua, I went to explore the town. Antigua used to be Guatemala's capital before it was ruined by a series of earthquakes in the 18th century. Many of the old churches have been left standing in their damaged state. This is one of them:

In the next picture you can see some of the church's interior - of course it's not possible to enter the ruin, so I took the picture through a gate on the side of the church. Isn't it amazing how the remains of the interior decoration contrast with both the rough edges where the wall was ripped away and nature reclaiming its territory?

Continuing my aimless wanderings in the streets of Antigua, I suddenly had the most wonderful smell in my nose: chocolate! Looking around, I quickly found the source: a small chocolate museum. Of course I went in, chocolate addict that I am ;-) On the door, they had a sign advertising chocolate workshops. Since I had wanted to learn more about chocolate in the country of the Maya anyway, I decided that here and now was the right time for it - and luckily they had a space in their workshop that same afternoon.

The workshop started with an overview of how cocoa is grown, harvested and processed. I already knew that the process consisted of fermentation, drying, roasting, and grinding. What I didn't know was that Germany is the world's largest per capita consumer of chocolate - apparently, each and every German eats 114 bars of chocolate per year.

After the theoretical part of the workshop, the fun started: starting from fermented and dried cocoa beans, we did each of the following steps ourselves. First came the roasting which was rather uneventful: the process took about 15 minutes during which we only had to take care that the beans were roasted evenly and didn't burn.

Then we peeled the roasted beans, separating the husk from the cocoa nibs inside. We used the husk to make cocoa tea - the first culinary highlight of the day :-) The tea tasted like cocoa, but of course it didn't contain any actual chocolate. Calorie-free chocolate, anyone?

Then, we had to grind the peeled cocoa nibs. Today, there are machines to do the grinding, but we did it the way the Maya had done it - and the way the Spanish did it for the first 200 years after they got to know chocolate in America: manually. This is before the grinding...

... and this after:

During the grinding, the heat produced by grinding stone against stone liquefies the fat contained in the cocoa beans, so that the end product is not powder, but a thick paste. As soon as you stop grinding, the paste hardens again. That's why it looks slightly powdery in this picture (there are cocoa nibs on the top, husk on the lower left, and ground nibs on the lower right):

In industrial processes nowadays, the ground cocoa is then pressed to separate cocoa butter from cocoa powder. Cocoa butter can be sold to make cosmetics, and that's why cocoa butter is replaced by soy lecithin in cheap chocolate. Soy lecithin is the fat contained in soy beans, and available much cheaper than cocoa butter.

Cocoa butter is also used to make white chocolate. Since cocoa powder is brown, it is useless for white chocolate. Instead, cocoa butter is combined with milk and flavorings such as vanilla to make white chocolate. So white chocolate doesn't contain any actual cocoa! That was a bit of interesting news for me.


In the workshop, we skipped the pressing step and instead made hot chocolate, Maya style. The Mayans combined ground cocoa beans with water, chili, maize, a red spice for coloring, and honey or fruit nectar to make their hot chocolate drink, called the food of the gods. Only kings and priests were allowed to use honey, probably due to its scarcity; ordinary people used fruit nectar. To celebrate the occasion, we used honey (of course). The drink tasted incredibly good, very rich and chocolaty, and also very spicy.

When the Spanish came to America and discovered chocolate, they didn't care much for the spicy concoction of the Maya, and so they changed a couple of things. They left out chili and maize and instead added cardamom or anise and a bit of pepper, and they used sugarcane sugar instead of honey. After a few years, someone finally had the genius idea of replacing water with milk - leading to a drink tasting very much like the hot chocolate we know today. Of course, when you make it yourself with such fresh ingredients, the taste is much intensified compared to the stuff made from chocolate powder. I can only say, YUM!

To make chocolate that you can actually bite into, there are two more steps to do, conching and tempering. Conching reduces the size of the cocoa bits in the chocolate to produce a smooth feel, and tempering creates a smooth look by aligning the cocoa crystals in a heating and cooling process. We didn't do any of these ourselves - conching alone can take more than a day - but instead used some pre-prepared chocolate for the highlight of the workshop: making our own chocolates. The chocolate we used was 70% cocoa and 30% sugar, containing no milk or other flavorings - we were free to add these ourselves. We had a ton of ingredients to experiment with: macadamia nuts, almonds, raisins, coffee beans, ground coffee, candied ginger, grated ginger, powdered ginger, candied orange, chili powder, cardamom, salt, pepper, cookies, milk powder, cinnamon, sugar, etc. Somehow the process of filling liquid chocolate into small molds and adding one or more of the ingredients took me twice as long as all the other participants in the workshop... but then again, no two of the chocolates I made were the same, maybe that explains why I was so slow ;-)

When all of the chocolate was used, the chocolates went into the fridge to cool and harden - they were ready for pickup the next morning. Having tasted them, I can say that they were absolutely fabulous! Especially the ones I made with ginger and/or chili. So goood!

Day 320: Goodbye, Tamarindo!

Today it was time to say goodbye to Tamarindo. We had booked an afternoon shuttle back to San Jose where our flights would leave early next morning. So we used the morning to take a nice long walk on the beach and go swimming once more. The light and air very early in the morning were simply beautiful: crisp, clear and just the right temperature. The best time of day to go running on the beach - just as these two obviously thought:

We also found a couple of pretty shells on the beach. My favorite was this cone-shaped one:

Back in the hotel, we discovered that playing in the waves has certain implications for swimwear: there was a ton of sand in my bikini, and even after rinsing it repeatedly, the amount of sand that came out never diminished. 

Day 319: Mangroves in the Estuary

This morning, we made a tour of the Tamarindo estuary. The tour started at 6am to ensure the best possible conditions: the weather in the mornings is usually good, even in the rainy season, and the animals are supposed to be just waking up. As it turned out, we had another advantage: we were the only boat making the tour this early, so there was nothing to disturb nature before we came.

Consequently, we saw some pretty amazing sights. Several times, there were crocodiles swimming in front of the boat. It was fun to watch how they dove down every time as soon as they realized that they were not alone anymore.

The morning sun made the mangroves lining the estuary on both sides reflect beautifully in the water.

Bird-wise, we saw parrots, ibises, black-bellied whistling ducks - and a few others that I don't recall the names of. We also saw a group of howler monkeys sleeping in the trees. According to our guide, the monkeys eat leaves of a certain tree that are toxic for them - with the result that the monkeys go to sleep. This somewhat reminded me of what happens to humans when they drink too much alcohol...

Day 317-318: Relaxing in Tamarindo

We didn't do much these two days: we hung out at the beach, explored the village, and bought a few souvenirs. In the mornings, we could observe variegated squirrels having fun in the trees nearby. Their coloring is amazing - they almost look like toy animals where the designer went a little wild with the color of their body fur, its contrast to their white face and tail, and the size of the tail :-)

When we went to explore Tamarindo, a pattern became apparent after a while: there are exactly five types of places in town: restaurants, souvenir shops, surf shops, hotels, and real estate agents. Apparently it's en vogue for foreigners to buy property in Costa Rica, especially at prime locations like nice beaches.

In the evenings, we went to the beach again to look at the sunset. Since it's the rainy season, it's not spectacular every night, but this one was quite nice:

Day 316: To Tamarindo

Today we left Liberia to spend the rest of our time in Costa Rica at the Pacific coast. There are about a thousand beaches there, so we picked one of them more or less randomly: Tamarindo. Tamarindo has the advantage of both being close to a national park and being accessible by a good paved road.

The beach is beautiful, seemingly endless, and not very crowded at this time of year. 

There was a fleet of small tourist and fishing boats lying in the bay just in front of the beach. Since it's low season, they don't see a lot of business right now. Their white color stood out nicely against the dark clouds:

I know I keep repeating myself concerning the low/rainy season. But it's really amazing to me just how low low season is in Costa Rica. I've traveled through other low seasons during my trip, but Costa Rica seems almost deserted. Maybe because it's such a huge family holiday destination - unlike most of the other places I've visited? 

Day 315: Rincón de la Vieja

Rincón de la Vieja is a volcano in one of Costa Rica's world heritage areas, the Guanacaste conservation area. Since the volcano is active right now emitting toxic gases, the trail up to the crater is closed. A beautiful alternative is the Las Pailas trail, a circuit along several of the geothermal curiosities in the area. I had no idea that the trail would be more like a real hiking trail with a few ups and downs rather than a broad sidewalk like the paths at the other volcanoes had been. Consequently, I hadn't been able to warn my mum about what awaited her - but maybe it was better she didn't know beforehand ;-)

Seeing how she walked on the trail - making slightly too long steps, hesitating a lot before choosing a step, and holding on to every rock and branch available - reminded me of the way I was hiking about two years ago. Towards the end of our hike, I saw a real improvement - just another piece of evidence that hiking is a skill like any other: it gets better with practice.

After about one third of the circuit, we came across the first sight: a small waterfall. The stones overgrown with green moss made a lovely contrast with the stones polished blank by water running over them.

A little later, we ran into another group of hikers all gathered around, looking at the ground as if there was something there to see. I stopped to look - but it took me a second to spot it. Can you see it in the picture?

Hint: look for the brown lizard in the center of the picture. Isn't his camouflage just perfect?

After the waterfall, the trail turned into a huge geothermal playing ground with a quick succession of steam vents, boiling pools and rocks colored by whichever chemicals are bubbling up from the ground. This is just one of the places where the lush green landscape was interrupted by a fumarole - hot steam coming out of the ground:

At another place, steam was complemented by pools of boiling water:

But for me, the main highlight were the bubbling mud pools. Apparently, what's bubbling here is mostly volcanic ash and clay, mixed with a bit of water. The sound the pools made - like a huge pot of thick soup slowly cooking on the stove - was just amazing.

At another place, mud bubbling deep down gave the appearance of a sort of mini-volcano, constantly venting steam:

Compared with the other volcanic areas we visited in Costa Rica - Irazú, Poás and Arenal - this was maybe the most impressive. Good thing we did it last!

Day 314: Liberia

Liberia is a small and not overly pretty town. But, since it is the entry point for the nearby national park, we went there anyway. The town center has a pretty central park, and opposite the park is this modern church:

I just love the contrast between the white church and the very dark sky in that moment. And of course, a few minutes later, the dark sky turned into a major downpour - which we sat out having lunch at a lovely Mexican place.

Apart from that, the only thing worth noting was that I got bitten by some kind of horsefly on the way to Liberia. In retrospect, three days after the bite, I can say that this was by far the most uncomfortable insect bite I ever had. The first day, the bite hurt and burned. Then it started swelling up until my entire upper arm and the elbow joint were almost twice their normal size. And then the itching came. Ah well.  Now, on the third day after the bite, the swelling has gone down significantly, but the itching is still there from time to time. Overall, an experience I am not very keen on repeating ;-)

Day 313: Orchids, Frogs and the Cloud Forest

Monteverde offers a great way to explore the cloud forest: a series of hanging bridges takes you on a trail through the forest, offering the opportunity to see different levels of the forest up close. Since cloud forest is a very dense and humid forest, the vegetation changes as you go higher up in the forest: the plants needing more light only grow on the upper levels.

The hanging bridges also allow you to look down on some of the lower levels, revealing such beautiful sights as this star-shaped fern:

Just to give you an impression of the hanging bridges, they varied in length between 50 and 150 meters, and in height between 20 and 35 meters. This is one of them photographed from below - you can really  see how it takes you through a different level of the forest.

The bridges were very stable, but still, it had taken me a few days to convince my mum to consider hanging bridges at all. Once we were there, however, she enjoyed the bridges and the views very much - just another piece of evidence that fear of heights isn't a permanent condition :-). From above, the bridges looked like this: 

Walking along the trail with open eyes, there were new plants to discover every few meters and so we stopped all the time to take pictures. We would have driven any guide mad with our lack of speed ;-) But then again, it was absolutely enjoyable - and worth it for pictures of pretty red berries like these...

... or vines grown into natural knots like here...

... or bushes full of little purple flowers like these:

Back from the cloud forest, we visited Santa Elena's orchid garden. The entrance fee included a guided tour of the gardens. At first, I thought the guide would be wholly unnecessary, but it turned out that we wouldn't have seen much without her: most of the orchids in bloom were miniature orchids. I didn't even know that such a thing existed, assuming all orchids had the size and blooming frequency of the indoor plants I knew from home. But, as it turned out, I couldn't have been more wrong. Actually, most of the orchids native to Costa Rica are miniature orchids, the tiniest one measuring only one or two millimeters. The blooming frequency of natural orchids is a little different from the indoor varieties, too: they bloom only once a year, depending on the type from one day to a maximum of five weeks. In addition, as soon as a flower is pollinated, it falls off, leaving the space and nutrients to grow the new seeds.

The guide also explained the origin of the word orchid: it is a Greek word meaning 'testicle'. She said they were named like this for the water-storing bulbs some orchids have that look slightly similar to testicles.

Unfortunately, the tiniest orchids were impossible to photograph - at least with my camera. But I got good shots of a few bigger ones. This one, for example, is a bull orchid, named like this for the two horns and the dark eyes on the sides. It blooms for three days every year. Our visit was the second day. It was one of the biggest orchids in the garden, measuring at least five centimeters across.

This next one was a lot smaller, maybe one to two centimeters big:

On the next picture, there are many flowers of the same type, each measuring less than a centimeter:

Later in the afternoon, we topped the day off with a visit to a frog pond. At least it was called a 'pond' - in reality it had more resemblance to a zoo. There were more than twenty terrariums displaying about thirty different types of frogs and toads. I took the opportunity to ask the guide what the difference between frogs and toads actually is - something I had wondered about for quite some time now. He explained that both frogs and toads have poison glands (the poison may or may not be dangerous to humans). The difference is where these glands are located. Toads have them on the outside of their skin, giving them a warty look, while frogs have them inside, making their skin appear smoother.

There were also two types of snake. This one just opened her eyes as we were passing and looked at us:

The guide also explained the mating process of frogs which I found very interesting. The female frog has eggs in her belly. When it comes to mating, the male frog sits on top of the female for five days or so, massaging her belly. Then the female carries the male to some body of water, lays the eggs, and the male covers them in his sperm. These are two red-eyed tree frogs mating - notice how the male is noticeably smaller than the female, making it easier for her to carry him:

The entrance fee to the frog pond allowed a daytime and a nighttime visit. Since our daytime visit was just about half an hour before nightfall, we decided to stick around and wait. Lucky that we did, because the nighttime visit turned out to be a great experience. We each received a flashlight and were allowed to walk through the ranario to spot frogs ourselves. As most of the frogs are nocturnal, they were also much more active than during the daytime tour. I felt almost like a detective, looking for clues in the most obscure places with my flashlight ;-)

Day 312: Coffee in Monteverde

La Fortuna and Monteverde are less than 50 kilometers apart. Even so, the quickest option to travel between the two takes more than three hours and involves two busses and a boat. The roads on the way are truly awful - far from paved, of course. With a bit of teeth-clenching and telling ourselves that the free massage was really quite pleasant, we finally made it to Santa Elena, the biggest village in the vicinity of the Monteverde cloud forest reserve.

In the afternoon, we booked a tour of El Trapiche, a small family-owned coffee and sugarcane plantation. I learned that in all of Costa Rica, coffee farmers exclusively produce Arabica coffee. The guide explained that the government passed a law at the end of the eighties to make all farmers switch to Arabica. The purpose behind this is that due to its small size Costa Rica cannot compete on quantity on the world market. Since Arabica coffee is deemed to be of higher quality than Robusta, the move towards Arabica was done to be able to compete on quality instead.

I learned another thing about gourmet coffee that I hadn't known so far. Coffee fruits can develop beans with one, two or three parts inside. If there's only one part, in about 5% of all fruits, the bean is called a peaberry, and yields much higher prices. This is the machine to separate peaberries from other beans of different sizes:

It works like this: you pour the beans on top, the machine vibrates, and so the round peaberries stay on top, while the thinner two-seed beans fall through to the lower layers. Simple, but effective.

The second part of the tour concerned sugarcane. We visited some part of the plantation - as with so many agricultural crops, hybrids (that combine the advantages of several natural varieties) are used for production. In the case of sugarcane, the favored traits are size and sweetness, of course. We were also given some fresh sugarcane to chew. The fiber tastes more or less neutral, and so you only chew on the cane to extract the sugarcane juice - which is really yummy! This is a bit of peeled sugarcane:

From the plantation back to the main buildings, we rode in a traditional Costa Rican ox cart. In times past, everything was transported by ox carts, and they were also the only way to found new settlements. I have to say, I admire the adventure spirit of these people! Ox carts are bumpy rides, to say the least.

Next to pulling ox carts, the oxen also had the task of powering the trapiche - the sugarcane press. (Interestingly enough, there is no English Wikipedia page for trapiche, just a Spanish one.) Oxen have to be specially trained for this task since it's not as easy as it looks: the ox on the inner side has to walk more slowly than the one on the outside, for example. The oxen also know when to start walking and when to stop. In our small demonstration, they stopped walking the second there was no more sugarcane to go into the press.

To make sugar or sweets from sugarcane juice, the juice first has to be boiled. To make fresh brown sugar, the boiling juice is poured into small molds and left there to cool slowly. To make sweets, for example fudge, the boiling juice is poured onto a surface. There all kinds of flavors can be added - chocolate, peanuts, coconut, etc. - and then the mass is stirred to cool it down quickly. So that's the only difference between brown sugar and fudge: how fast you make it cool down after boiling. This is the fudge-in-making that we made ourselves during the tour - it has chocolate and peanuts in it:

One last interesting thing I learned on the tour concerned this plant:

In case you don't know (like myself before the tour): it's a tobacco plant. The guide gave us small bits of its leaves to taste. They didn't taste anything like the flavor we know from cigars and cigarettes since that flavor comes from the fermentation process after the harvest. Instead, the leaves tasted spicy, very much like fresh pepper. Fascinating!

Day 311: La Fortuna Waterfall

On our second day in La Fortuna, we decided to visit the Fortuna waterfall, a part of the Río Fortuna that plunges down for 70 meters (if not imaginative, they were at least consistent in their naming here ;-)). Since it would have been a six kilometer hike just to get there, we took a taxi to go and only made the return hike. When we got to the viewing platform, we had a view not only of the waterfall, but also of the surrounding forest. And since we were pretty high up, we got a good look at birds that dwell in the treetops, such as this toucan:

From the viewpoint, we descended a few steps (480 to be exact) to arrive at the bottom of the waterfall. The water crashing down from about 70 meters above has created a pool with a beautiful light blue color. Since the day was hot, the water looked even more inviting than the picture suggests.

We decided to swim in another pool, a few meters downstream, which is considered safer and is also more accessible. The water was really quite cold, especially considering the temperature of the air, but once we had made it inside, it was just lovely, very pleasant and refreshing. From down there, we had another beautiful view of the waterfall...

... and the small rapids a little further down:

On the hike back, we once again had a beautiful view of Arenal - the second day in a row, and in the middle of the rainy season at that. I guess we got really really lucky here :-)

Back in town, we were starving and looked for a restaurant. Looking a bit indecisive, we were approached by a guy on the street. He turned out to be a Cuban who has been living in Costa Rica for 26 years, handling the horses for one of the tour agencies in La Fortuna. He recommended a tiny locally owned place just across the street. Since we didn't have any better ideas, we decided to give it a try, and the food turned out to be very good indeed. The drinks were excellent, too: I got a drink called chan - a certain type of seed rehydrated in water. Delicious - and pretty!

Day 310: Volcán Arenal

Having arrived in La Fortuna late yesterday night, we spent the morning figuring out what we wanted to do and see here. After completing a handful of chores in the village (post office, bank, and the like), we booked a tour for the afternoon and evening: a hike at the base of the Arenal volcano, followed by a visit to thermal baths in the evening.

According to our guide, the volcano is visible at only 77 days a year. The rest of the time it is shrouded in a more or less impenetrable cover of clouds. It being the rainy season right now, we didn't hold high hopes of seeing the volcano. But then, in the early afternoon, the clouds suddenly lifted and revealed a gorgeous view of Arenal.

Arenal is the only classically cone-shaped volcano in Costa Rica - a bit surprising in a country with more than sixty volcanos! The face of the volcano looking at La Fortuna is covered with forest. For the hike, we were driven around the volcano to the other face - the one where the last big eruption occurred in 1968, and which is not yet covered in vegetation again. This way, we had a wonderful view of the lava flows produced by the volcano, with the lowest parts slowly being recaptured by plants.

Turning around at our viewpoint, we suddenly had a gorgeous, and wholly unexpected, view of lake Arenal. This is an artificial lake created after the 1968 eruption. It is a huge hydroelectric project, generating some percentage of Costa Rica's energy (more than 40% according to our guide, 17% according to Wikipedia).

After the hike, we went to relax in the Baldi hot springs complex. Based on my prior experience with hot springs, I was expecting a small facility with a handful of pools with different water temperatures. I couldn't have been more wrong: Baldi was a huge complex with easily more than twenty pools, water slides, steam chambers, restaurants and wet bars. This is one of the pools; water is pumped to the top of the stone pyramid and from there falls down into a series of three pools. The fact that the water steams even in the hot and humid conditions in La Fortuna should give you an indication of how hot it actually was :-)

Next to all the wonderfully relaxing hot pools, there were also great views of Arenal from some spots. From this side of the volcano, you can clearly see that it really consists of two craters. The left one is 7000 years old and dormant now, while the right one is active and only 44 years old - it was created in the 1968 eruption.