It's Always a Good Time for Coffee!

June 9

Today we went on the Britt plantation coffee tour. Coffee originated in Ethiopia in ancient times. It did not arrive in Costa Rica until 1750. Coffee is grown in the shade of taller trees. Seeds are sown in moist earth and covered with banana leaves. It takes about a month for a seedling to sprout, and three and a half years before the first harvest. But each plant grows coffee at a different rate so one plant may have ripe beans as well as unripened beans. Therefore coffee has to be picked by hand. A machine can’t differentiate between ripened beans and unripened beans.

To process, coffee beans are put in a water tank. Bad coffee beans float, good coffee beans are heavier and will sink. This allows for easier separation. They are further separated by hand to make sure there are no green coffee beans. It’s then fermented to remove the mucilage. The outer shell is removed and coffee is dried in its inner skin —called the parchment. Then it is peeled and roasted. The length of the roast determines the strength of the coffee. Light roast isn’t strong. The longer you roast the coffee the more natural oils are released, accounting for the darker color and stronger flavor. The lighter roast has more caffeine because the longer you roast coffee the more caffeine gets evaporated. The waste parchment is used to make coffee paper. And the outer shell is mixed with chicken manure for fertilizer.

We left the coffee plantation to head up north to La Fortuna. Driving through the cities of the Central Valley region there is a clear distinction between the houses of the “haves” and the “have nots”. There are also fruit trees and coffee plants EVERYWHERE. The farther we get north, the higher our elevation. And the roads are NARROW! As we pass a small community school, Gustavo, our guide informs us that the literacy rate in Costa Rica is 97%.

Two and a half hours after leaving the coffee plantation we arrive in La Fortuna for lunch, then we proceed to Arenal National Park. This tree is host to a number of bromeliads, which are episites as opposed to parasites. One howler monkey and several hundred leaf cutter ants later we arrive at Lake Arenal, a man made lake at the base of the volcano.

I decided to take the optional night hike after dinner. 
We had a very entertaining guide named Daniel.

Our group of nine saw so many of Costa Rica’s little tree frogs that I lost count. The most interesting to me were the translucent glass frog, the poisonous blue jeans frog and the red eyed tree frog. We also saw a couple of snail eater snakes and one deadly fer-de-lance, one of the most venomous and aggressive snakes alive. We steered very clear of that one. My favorite thing that we saw was the Jesus Christ lizard— so named because it walks on water. We also saw the famous sloth, and a kinkajou, which is related to the lemur.