Tiff & Jared's adventures

Day 5

After our unique journey to La Fortuna, we settled into our rooms at Paradise Hot Springs by early afternoon, with a day of relaxation on the menu! Our rooms were at the back of the resort, and the patios had views looking straight at Arenal Volcano (at least, when it wasn’t completely covered in clouds). The hot springs within the resort are naturally heated by the same volcano by flowing the water through the earth and gaining temperature and minerals before it makes its way to the resort – AND without the sulfuric smell I’m used to with the hot springs in Colorado! We bee-lined it for the pools with the swim up bar to get some lunch and drinks before heading to our spa appointments.

When the time came for the spa, I unfortunately had to sit out and go to the pharmacy because I had some nasty bug bite reactions on my legs and didn’t want to irritate them further, so I sat out and had a relaxing evening before syncing back up with the girls for dinner! Overall, it was a very relaxing and low-key day. We had one more planned activity together before the group broke up our group split up to head back home.

Day 6

We slept in a bit this morning, and headed down to the restaurant for breakfast before going to our Coffee and Chocolate Tour with North Fields at 10AM. North Fields is a 5th generation family-run farm that focuses on providing amazing tours focused on two of the main economic pillars of Costa Rica. Their eco-friendly tour includes walking through production step by step, including the planting, harvesting, processing, drying, milling, roasting and tasting (the most important part). After a mere five minute ride to the farm from our hotel, we were ready to learn all about C&C!

As the tour started, our guide Alberto asked the group to introduce ourselves and where we all were from – ironically, everyone in the group was from either California, Virginia or Colorado (all three states where our group was from!). Talk about small world!

Alberto started the tour with the sweeter side of things – chocolate. We got to see what a cocoa plant looks like, and I had NO idea what to expect. The cocoa fruit is a football-shaped pod, and once the shell is cracked open, the inside exposes a bunch of quarter-sized seeds. Alberto let us each take a seed from the plant and suck on it – it tasted very citrusy and a little tangy – crazy to think that the seeds eventually turn into chocolate! A few fun facts that we learned:

• One tree typically contains about 40 fruits, or 1 kilogram. Then, 10,000 trees make approximately 10,000 chocolate bars (I think I wrote that down correctly ;))
• The majority of the country’s chocolate is exported as raw materials to Switzerland, Germany and Netherlands
• The farm plants “decoy” trees like bananas and pineapples to deter squirrels and other animals from damaging the cocoa trees

After learning everything about the process, we got to the last step – tasting! Alberto roasted some cocoa seeds for us and milled it into a delicious chocolate paste. We got to try different types of chocolate (i.e., 60% dark, 70% dark, 80% dark), to understand how the level of bitterness increased with less sugar included. We also got to try hot chocolate – it was all delicious!

Cocoa-ed out, we had a brief intermission where we got to taste some fresh-squeezed sugarcane. We learned that one of the liquors we’d been drinking on the trip, guaro, is actually derived from the sugarcane plant. I got the opportunity to use the hand crank to squeeze some fresh sugarcane juice – it tasted subtly sweet, almost like apple juice? Then Alberto gave us the heavy stuff, and we got to have a shot of guaro – basically some dang moonshine!

At this point, we were ready for the last part of the tour – coffee. We started by listening to Alberto talk about the origin of the coffee bean. Seems pretty obvious but never really thought about it – the bean was first discovered in Ethiopia before making its way to the Arabian Peninsula. After it’s cultivation there, the coffee’s journey continued to spread globally, eventually reaching Europe and the Americas. We learned about the various types of roast (green coffee, light, medium, dark, BURNT), and I didn’t realize that whether you’re drinking a light or dark roast, it’s basically the same amount of caffeine. Some other fun facts that we learned:

• Coffee beans are generally harvested from November through January, and the beans are picked by hand. Sometimes, there is only one bean in the pod, and this is called peaberry, or espresso.
• San Jose was the third city with electricity, after New York and Paris (can’t remember how this came up but fun fact!).
• Indicators of caffeine include extraction time, species of coffee, and volume. Espresso is simply a high concentration flavor.
• Forty-five days is peak freshness for coffee beans post-roasting (however, it’s completely fine to drink coffee after this amount of time).

I’m not a huge coffee aficionado and preferred the chocolate tasting, but the coffee was very tasty to try! We got to learn about all the different methods to brew coffee, including a very typical Costa Rican drip method (that looks like the coffee is being strained through a dirty sock). It was fun to study the coffee wheel and try to decipher all the different flavors (for example, fruity, sweet, nutty, spicy, roasted, sour, or vegetative). The wheel had dozens of potential flavors from pineapple to caramelized to peanuts to smoky to acrid to rubber to skunky to meaty-brothy (yum) to fresh to whiskey! I never realized just how many different flavor profiles that coffee could project.

After an educational two and a half hours later, we ended up at the gift shop (of course bought some whole bean coffee and chocolate bars). This was a super informative and experiential tour – definitely encourage others to learn about some of the country’s most popular exported goods.

We made it back to the hotel by early afternoon, and hung around for a bit before Keira and Marilyn had to head back to San Jose. Taylor and I had a relaxing rest of the day, making it to the Ficus coffee bar and getting a pair of delicious poke bowls while watching the horses and donkeys roam in the fields in front of us. We stayed for the happy hour at the bar and got some tasty screwdrivers and mojitos before I went to the spa for my Dulce Chocolate treatment, which included a chocolate body wrap, mini facial and swedish massage (had to keep the chocolate theme of the day going!). It was a super indulgent experience and I smelled and looked like a chocolate bar by the time I was all wrapped up and wrapped within my cocoon. The massage itself was very relaxing – my first massage ever! Great experience overall before meeting Taylor for a light dinner between the two of us.

We were hyping ourselves up for our last day together, as we had a full day tour planned to Rio Celeste. Alas though- it wasn’t meant to be! During dinner, we got a notification that the following day’s tour had been cancelled due to weather. Not to worry – we are excellent adapters and quickly found Plan B. We decided to have a relaxing morning at the resort and then head to town for a tour that we found on Airbnb – a sloth tour and tortilla making class!

Day 7

The tour we booked didn’t start until 1PM, so we had another relaxing morning around the resort, going in for breakfast and then changing into swimsuits one last time for more hot springs! The weather was definitely a little muggy, and the volcano was still shrouded behind clouds for most of the morning. Around lunchtime, we called an Uber for the ~5 minute ride to downtown La Fortuna, and walked a little ways out of town to the parking lot for Mariolas Trail, where the tour took place. The only other people on our tour was a couple from Uruguay, so I was overruled with Spanish being the primary language of the tour. What a ride! Good practice though and was able to pick up on things which was nice affirmation. The tour embarked on a journey through the 1.5km trail system, offering great opportunities to see the various flora and fauna of the area. Within five minutes, we saw our first sloth not 15 feet away from us in the trees! Our guide had a scope so we were able to take some great pictures with our phones. We learned a lot of fun facts about the humble sloth, or perezoso, including the following:

• As I’ve highlighted, there are two species of sloths in CR – the two-toed and the three-toed. I can’t remember which species this fact relates to, but during birth, the mother has her baby in the trees. As soon as it pops out, it free-falls before catching by its umbilical cord – like a bungee jump! Crazy, we even got to see a video of it.
• Sloths come down to the forest floor maybe once a week to poop, and besides that, they’re always up in the trees.
• Sloths aren’t the most intelligent creatures. After the sloth gives birth, it’s a few months before it’s ready to reproduce again. Sometimes, after the male and female are done with their business, the baby sloth of the mother will attach to the male sloth and be carried away, sometimes never seeing it’s mom again.
• A sloth has one stomach, but four chambers (like a cow). It takes something like one week to a month to digest the leaves that they ingest!?

Throughout the tour, we also saw a Jesus Christ lizard (they’re so fast that they appear to walk on water – can run something like 6 meters in 2 seconds), a lime green poison dart frog, a hoard of bats sleeping under a banana leaf, and several other sloths. Our guide was very knowledgable about perezosos! After finishing the loop, we ended back at the pergola area, where we all got to form our balls of dough into tortillas before grilling and eating them with some veggies and cheese, along with some tasty papaya juice! For a mere $36, I’d say the tour was well worth it for as much as we saw.

After a healthy snack of tortillas, we still wanted to eat more before our 5PM shuttle to San Jose. We walked back to town and went to Jungle Bowls, a delicious bowl and juice bar shop. I got probably one of the best bowls I’ve ever had with a dragonfruit base and loaded up with fresh fruits, local honey and granola. The bowls were massive and we got them to go back to the resort and sit at the pools before our shuttle pick-up. By the time we left town, we finally got a full glimpse of the Arenal Volcano, just in time for us to leave!

The ride back to San Jose was dark, rainy, windy and a little nauseating – I will not miss the crazy driving down there! We made it to our hotel El Rodeo Estancia Boutique Hotel & Steak House just in time for one more steak dinner before my 3AM wake up call!

Costa Rica was a wonderful trip with good friends, beautiful flora and fauna, good vibes and Pura Vida.