Day 6 – Birds and Chocolate

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The early morning bird watching tour was due to start at 5.30. Of course, this would be the morning with no howler monkey alarm call, no sleepless night worrying about driving up mountain tracks, no pouring rain, no truck noises. I slept soundly and didn’t wake up until 5.20. Nor did anyone else. It was a rush to get ready and out the door.

Our guide today was Geiner (the “G” pronounced as if it was an “H” in English). His tour was very different in style to Jaime’s night-time walk. His style was quite diffident, but he knew his stuff. He had a knack of spotting birds at rest in the trees with plenty of time to set up his tripod and telescope, even enough time to have a look and even enough time to attempt some pictures before the birds flew off.

A kingfisher was one of our first spots.

A toucan perched briefly, before flying off with its partner.

There were parakeets squawking and flocking just like they do in England nowadays. There were countless other birds flitting about, many, boring, looking just like sparrows but many with startling plumage, like this one.

Jenny had her own camera with zoom lens. She could do her own thing. Sarah and I were trying to do Charlene’s trick of taking pictures through Geiner’s telescope. It was surprisingly difficult, needing a steady hand which neither Sarah nor I had. All the pictures above were taken by Geiner after he had very patiently watched our feeble efforts, as we failed to get the knack of the telescope-phone-camera trick.

After a walk around the gardens looking for poisonous frogs, we said goodbye to Geiner. However, we couldn’t help note his tee-shirt which advertised the chocolate place across the road – Best Chocolate Sarapiqui. He ran that as well as doing bird-watching tours.

We had a late 8 am breakfast. The rest of the morning was chill-out time at the jungle house, doing things like resting in a hammock. We saw a big howler monkey climbing a tree to survey his domain which I guess included our house.

>>sorry, picture of monkey missing, lost!

We had a free afternoon, and although we had already been extravagant on tours, we couldn’t get the idea of Geiner’s chocolate tour out of our heads. There’s no point resisting temptation where chocolate is concerned, so we got reception to book us on the tour which started at 3 pm. Perfect, we could do the tour then go somewhere nice for dinner.

So, at 3 am, began our second experience of the day with Geiner. This chocolate tourwas clearly something he loved doing. Chocolate tasting three times a day? That is one reason, but also Cacao farming was in his family’s heritage. Even though cacao is no longer a significant Costa Rican crop, disease having ravaged the plants in the 1970s, Geiner saw it as a way to promote awareness of the ecological balance cacao farming required. His venture brought the local community together and pulled the tourists in.

We went into the cacao plantation at the back of his establishment. The trees are unusual, flowering off the trunk. Even though each flower lasts for only a few days, the profuse flowering means that a single tree can produce a hundred or more fruits each year, with the crucial pollination work being done by tiny flies perfectly adapted to the task.

Once we’d sat down for the cocoa talk proper. Geiner broke open some fruits and let us taste the raw beans in their flesh. This was how consumption started with the Olmecs, ancestors of the Aztecs, using the fruit as a sweetish snack to eat on their journeys.

Traditionally the beans and flesh were put into boxes to drain and ferment (the drained liquid was turned into a beer). The process was similar to coffee production in many ways. After fermentation the beans were dried, roasted, then peeled, the last step achieved by crunching the beans up, then separating the resulting nibs from the papery shells by fanning the latter away, something we got to try. The nibs are the things you can buy in health food shops.

After that there is grinding with friction to melt the fat in the beans, the cocoa butter, to turn the nibs into a paste. This is now 100% chocolate, too bitter to really enjoy as is. but easily mixed with sugar, milk powder, vanilla, pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg (all of which we tried) to turn it into the delicacy that we all love.

Although our normal commercial chocolate starts out in the same way, the manufactures take the nibs and mechanically separate the cocoa butter and cocoa solids. The butter is far more valuable for cosmetics and is rarely used in chocolate making. Most popular chocolates only have 20% cocoa solids (10% in the US) but enough to be legally chocolate. The remaining fat, sugar and flavouring does not come from cacao at all. This is definitely something to think about (or not) when eating that Cadbury’s Dairy Milk bar.

As well as trying the authentic chocolate prepared in front of our eyes, we also tried a hot chocolate drink, some melted chocolate with the nibs, then, when I could hardly face any more chocolate, some mouldings to illustrate the art of tempering and crystalisation. Everything needed to be tasted. It would have been rude not to.

It was a great tour. Geiner was a talented presenter. Was it value for money? I would say it definitely. It was a fascinating two hours, and, by the end, I could not have eaten more chocolate if I’d tried.

We finished our evening with dinner, a short drive away at a roadside restaurant. Simple chicken fajitas for me, whereas Sarah and Jenny were adventurous, trying the ceviche, a traditional Peruvian dish of fish pieces marinated in lime and vinegar. With salad, this made for a nice and light refreshing dinner, perfect after a chocolate feast.

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