Costa Rica Part 2: La Fortuna-Cocoa Bean Plantation and Sabbath Day

We arrived in the early afternoon to La Fortuna! We had so much fun in La Fortuna that we could have spent our whole vacation here, if only there was a beach nearby. It was more inland but we had so many good adventures here. I just now realized that I can't put it all in one post because then there would be hundreds of pictures and videos, so here is the first part of our 4 days in La Fortuna. We went directly to the cocoa bean plantation where we did a tour. It turned out that we were the only people on the tour and it exceeded all our expectations. 

We were greeted by this baby toucan!

We saw how cocoa beans grew. We also got to see coffee beans, sugar cane, and various other plants grow. The said they only grow those other plants to help pollination, shade for the cocoa beans, and to distract creatures from eating the cocoa beans. We got to try a lot of these things. Sugar cane was so interesting to try raw.

Look close, can you see the mommy sloth and baby sloth? Yeah, I couldn't either...

 Here's a closer image where you can see their little feet!

We got to crack open some cocoa pods and taste the fruit inside. The fruit part tasted tropical, I thought it was similar to a mango, the cocoa bean is the seed inside the fruit, that is what they dehydrate and roast.

Drying out the cocoa beans

 The basilisk lizard, Max was excited because he saw this on wild Kratts with the boys.                                  

After we saw the whole process of preparing the bean, we were taken to this beautiful outdoor kitchen to make some chocolate. Basically, all my dreams were coming true. And I guess it is pretty rare for there to be only 2 people on the tour. We weren't complaining at all. It was so perfect.

 This was the refined cocoa beans.

We got to taste it with various seasonings, including: Cinnamon, chili pepper flakes, cardamom, pineapple, ginger, and that's all I can remember. Then we picked our favorite flavorings and made our own chocolate bar.

 We then roasted some of the beans and ground them up.  After a good grinding competition, we used the bike to grind them up some more. We then used those grounds to make hot chocolate.

 When it was all done, we were FULL. The cocoa was really rich and we couldn't finish the chocolates we made so it was good to take them back to the airbnb. Which is exactly what we did. We had an easy check in to a cute little house. We brought in all our stuff then went out to explore the town, but first, a pineapple photo shoot...

 Just across the street from the airbnb was a little souvenir shop where the woman made jewelry and the husband did woodwork so we checked out their crafts and picked  up a couple souveneirs for our boys! Then Max asked the kind lady if she knew of a place that did massages, she led us to a place on her moped, (Love the hospitality) and then Max worked out a deal with the massage therapist woman to get us a couple massage, facials, pedicures, and manicures! Ha! We made an appointment for a little later in the evening then made our way to have some dinner.

I missed the moment when there were actually large flames coming out of this dish.

Anyway, we scarfed down our dinner. I was actually feeling a little sick from the rich chocolate but I think normal food settled my stomach a bit.

Then we went to get our royal massage treatment and the massage ended up being like an hour and a half and everything else took a long time. When everything was said and done it was 3.5 hours later and super late. The massage and facials were great, but I believe that manicures and pedicures were not their specialty. haha! And when Max paid the agreed upon price, the owner acted dissapointemnt when she had previously been so excited to work with us. ha! Over all, it was a great way to relax and then go back home to sleep! It was a good fun filled day!

The next day was Sunday. The closest branch was 50 minutes away and and online it said it started at 9:10, we got up early and arrived just a couple minutes late come to find out it really started at 10. There were a group of kids there between the ages of 9-14 who were just hanging out while their parents were in meetings. They were so fun and ended up giving us a tour of the building and the property.

They showed us the banana tree. It is so cool to see how they grow. 

And the coconut tree!

This kid cracked us up, he wanted to teach us everything about the plants and creatures in Costa Rica, so he brought this bug into the church and kept it for the 2 hours. 

During the church service I didn't really know much of what was going on, so I ended up looking at the hymns and figuring out which songs they were based on the music. So that was pretty fun. I loved how I couldn't really understand a lot of what was being said and during the sacrament meeting and Sunday school I could start to recognize people's personality traits. we got to act out some parables and it was hilarious even when I didn't know what they were saying. 

Anyway, at the end of church, the branch president told us they had one more short self reliance meeting then he would love to have us over for lunch. We were excited. This is something Max really wanted to do but you can't just invite yourself over to someones house, but we really wanted to see how people lived and what they ate and remove ourselves from the touristy feeling. We were able to give his family a ride home and once we parked, we needed to go on a little hike to get to the house. When we got close, we realized it was a treehouse. So much cooler than we expected. And they had this pet bird that was super loud and whistled at us as we came close. 

As the mom was cooking dinner, we got a tour of all their property and farm animals. They had a fresh spring going through their property that brings the clean drinking water.
They have a goat, lots of chickens and roosters, 3 big pigs, some cows, and dogs. They showed us all their animals and told us all about the plants they can eat and use for a variety of purposes.

The majority of chickens were a lot smaller than we have in the US and this little rooster's crow was just a little squeak!

This pig was super curious and kept looking over the wall at us!

This was the magic plant we looked for in various cities called touch-me-not. The Spanish name is Dormir Lona which means something about sleeping. When you touch it, it closes up!

We had fun feeding the goat, Max actually would really love to have a goat to eat all our blackberry bushes. I'm telling you, chickens are a gateway farm animal. We will probably have a goat in the near future!

The father has started building another house right here.

The stream and the treehouse. I really didn't get a great photo of the treehouse but their kitchen and table were underneath the house and there were stairs that went through a floor trapdoor to where they slept upstairs and there weren't walls, only screens. They had previously lived in an apartment but his sister had given him this land and after coming out to it a lot to tend the farm, they decided to just move out there as a family and they have loved it!

Our lunch ended up being an early dinner but we (max) were able to chat with them and learn a whole lot about the Costa Rican culture! They were a wonderful family to be around!

After dinner, the mom, (I'm the worst, I don't remember their names and Max has their info written down in his phone and he's not here right now!) had made a special kind of bread dough with many ingredients we had never heard of. We walked it over to the neighbors house to bake it.

While we waited for the bread to cook, the neighbors showed us their horses which Max needed to ride!

Save a horse...

We enjoyed the sweet milky bread fresh from the oven then we wanted to make sure to get a picture with the family and to take a family photo. 

The boys had already changed out of their church clothes!

We ended up staying with them all day which was a great way to spend our Sunday! We were just grateful it worked out how it did! When we got home we finalized our plans for Monday, since it was the slower season in Costa Rica we found out that tours weren't very full and we could get a good deal if we scheduled them last minute. So we scheduled our canyoneering and white water rafting for the next morning! To be continued...