Plant(s) of the Gods!

I'm starting to wonder if I will be a widower before this trip is over. Yesterday, Mindy flirted with an enormous venomous ant. Today, she went traipsing through the underbrush - right where the snakes and scorpions hide! All in search of the perfect capture of this 1-year old sloth.

This was on her way to join us at breakfast - in our now usual spot overlooking the river in the jungle. 

Generally a lower-key day today, and the weather cooperated, in a strange way. We woke up to teeming rain. Well, we ARE in a rainforest, after all! We made a quick dash to breakfast and sat under cover listening to the sounds of the jungle. By the time our 10am Mocha Tour was coming along, the rain had stopped! (It returned several times throughout the day, but never at a point that it constrained what we were doing.)

So, the Mocha Tour, or as I refer to it, the Super Spreader Event Tour! Yep, let me get back to that...but that doesn't mean it wasn't excellent! A dozen of us together heading out together to see the cacao plants growing on the property, with pods slowly developing from baby to full size.

Eden Organic is - and this is true - an organic farm! So no chemical fertilizers means they spread the leaves and brush around the base of the trees. This is when we learned that those leaves draw scorpions and venomous snakes...after Mindy had been mucking about. We kept on the path after that!

Fun fact - cacao plants are pollinated by a fly that only lives in banana trees! (Not bees??!!) The plants are related, too - bananas and cacao (and also coffee).

Eden Organic Farm is actually too low to grow cacao very well as it's too humid at this low elevation, and as a result they lose a lot of their pods to rot. Those that ripen to maturity are cracked open to reveal the pussy, white, not-chocolate-looking-at-all innards.

Our guide reached into the pulpy mess and pulled out a bean to eat. The slimy outer is almost floral, and the hard brown inner is more what you'd expect in terms of unsweetened chocolate.

We're in the forest, so - of course - after he showed us how to eat a bean, he licked the remaining pulp off his fingers. He handed the pod around for others to help themselves (none of us having washed hands immediately before) and....I noticed he had another  and then licked his fingers again. Well, whatever! I ate some. Cool experience. (Mindy has experience with this "sharing" while on vacation. On our honeymoon, Mindy drank from our guide's "mate" gourd. Then he told us that he handed that gourd around to every tour he gives, and one never washes the gourd as the flavour is enhanced by each batch of tea.)

It's fine. What doesn't kill us...

Beans are left to ferment for several days and then are dried to evolve into a more familiar looking product. 

With his bare (licked) hands, he broke up one of the beans into my hand and encouraged me to taste it. Ummm, thanks? Mindy cleverly retrieved her own beans to taste.

Into the chocolate-making class! Rudimentary efforts to avoid cross-contamination (we each had our own spoons) but this place would NOT pass a DineSafe inspection as we each got four rounds (same spoon) of tasting liquid chocolate with various toppings, then relied on that same bowl of chocolate to portion out and make chocolate bombs.

Again, this doesn't matter, right? Entertaining guide, delicious taste-testing in a fantastic environment. Germs are....generally more distasteful than harmful. Besides, food of the gods, right?

Originally, the indigenous populations didn't believe the cacao pods were edible, until they saw monkeys eating the pulp. Good enough for them? Good enough for us! They ate the pulp and spat out the beans, but then smelled the beans fermenting a few days later, and recognized that what ferments can make alcohol. Dry it and grind it...

...then mix with water and spice to make the original xocolatl ("x" being a "sh" sound in the original Aztec language). Drink the liquor, add in some medicinal mushrooms, and one can commune with the gods! No wonder the celebratory nature of the bate bate!

Recovery from that kind of bender...sweet, sweet coffee!

In Costa Rica, kids are introduced to coffee very young! Perhaps not so wrong for us to have offered my cold brew to our kids earlier this week!

Back to the "home base" of Eden for lunch.

Everest and Lauren had made friends on the tour with some Spanish and English kids, and we had little planned in the rain. The kids played with their new friends for hours! During one of the pauses in rain, we wandered as a group down to the river and to see the cows, turkeys, donkeys, and other livestock on this farm. (Tense moment when we saw some staff with machetes unloading cows into a pen....what are our children about to witness??!! Happily it seemed the implements were unrelated to that specific activity.)

Ever the host, Everest was inviting the Spanish family back to our bungalow. Failing that, he wanted to buy them souvenirs from the little shop.😃 Eventually, without the company of the Spaniards, we made our way back to our temporary home to clean up.

Paradise

I am sitting with Mindy in our outdoor living room in the tropical rainforest, listening to the soothing sounds of cicadas and birds, and there are two angels sleeping in the room next to me. If - when I die - I go to heaven, it will be hard for it to compete with Eden in Costa Rica!

Before leaving on vacation, a friend (who barely survived his own trip to Costa Rica after unwitttingly handling a poisonous frog!) told me that Costa Rica is a country made for me. While I have loved all of this trip already, today proved that true!

So...what made today so incredible?

It started pretty inauspiciously in the wee hours of this morning when I left Mindy's and my bed to try to calm two children who were doing somersaults while they slept in the bed next to us. Quickly enough, I fell asleep again sharing a double bed among three of us while Mindy enjoyed a bed to herself the rest of the night!

(Not shown...Lauren with her head at the bottom of the bed and Everest sideways...)

Intending to work up a bit of an appetite before breakfast, we took the long way around on the "running trail" (more accurately a walking trail - too short and difficult footing for much running), right down to the "lake" (small fetid pond?). Don't take the preceding as criticism! We had some fun sights!

Fun to see such a large frog!

Everest and I were a little ahead of Mindy and Lauren when Mindy suddenly screamed, after reaching for a tree trunk and instead putting her hand right down on this cicada shedding it's skin!

Ugh!!!

Breakfast at Volcano Lodge was a feast - in keeping with its Las Vegas feel to Costa Rica. (As in, so manicured and curated an experience that it could practically be anywhere hot...and feeling kind of like the United States.) At the same time, it was definitely NOT Las Vegas with the towering Arenal Volcano in every backdrop!

Before taking another dip, Everest was insistent that we check out the games lounge. Now we have foosball and billiards tables on the list for home!

Once again to the pools and natural thermal waters we came for....with the company of a local.

(Not Mindy's first natural thermal pool with wildlife experience...memories of another trip!)

We were ultimately in a rush to get out of our room by noon checkout...kind of threw everything in the trunk (a problem for future Matt and Mindy). Good news, we avoided a late checkout charge and went in search of good coffee...which was surprisingly lacking at Volcano Lodge. Enter Sloffee Coffee! 

Tasty drinks and views into the jungle. 

I was excited to see a blur of a large black bird deep in the ravine - was that what we saw at Volcano lodge earlier? - and a much smaller bird visit the deck railing.

Yes, the black plumage was another Great Currasow.

We're really starting to see things now! Driving away from Sloffee, we stopped where a tour bus had stopped to see some vague silhouettes of toucans way up in the trees, as well as some vultures. Ok, maybe not quite as breathtaking as, say, a sloth, but still kind of cool. The wild pigs up on the hill were worth slowing down to look...not quite worth taking a photo.

What are we going to see at our next destination - La Fortuna Waterfall? After all, this was someone else's photo yesterday right along the path to the water!

500 steps down to the bottom and 500 more back up, so you definitely limit what you bring. Wear your bathing suit for the hike because there are no facilities at the bottom (and going bathing suit-less was not an option). There it is, off in the distance...

Around every corner...is that a sloth? No. But this is an extremely dangerous "bullet ant" whose venom feels like a gunshot. Freaking HUGE! (Mindy allowed her hand to be probably/definitely/absolutely way too close to give a sense of scale to the photo.)

Getting closer to the falls....

...and into the water!

500 stairs back up...carrying Lauren. Thankfully she's not the heftier child... Still no sloths. :(

But wait! A friendly local's telescope affords better than a silhouette of a toucan! Just for context, here's the unenhanced view:

And here's what Mindy charmed her way into us seeing!

Admittedly, three toucans flew much closer to us after that and we got a good view with the naked eye, but still nothing like that close-up!

Past 3pm, time to check in to the garden of Eden! I did not yet know how much I would fall in love with this place, but upon arrival, I started to get a sense. Cocoa "wine"? Cool! Typical Costa Rican cuisine including - finally - traditional chorreador brewed Costa Rican beans? Love it! Views of the ravine and river? Marvellous! Discovering a real, live unicorn (mantis)? Yes!

What's that we hear serenading us from in the jungle? Mantled Howler Monkeys!

The main event was yet to come...on the short walk from reception to our bungalow. No telephoto!

I could have touched it!!! I mean...I don't think I could have legally done that, as Costa Rica is very protective of their wildlife, but it was at arm's reach!

What a full day! Two young kids and two tired adults...we should head to bed, right? Wrong! Another tour - this time at night, guided by the almost-Canadian-Costa-Rican Alonzo. (Alonzo lived in Etobicoke for a little while and his first job in Canada was at Ajax Downs! He moved back home at least partly because of our cold winters...)

Alonzo showed us the wonders of the night-time jungle...and the wonders of night-time photography on Mindy's phone!

Pink bananas? Sounds perfect for my little girl who loves bananas and whose favourite colour is pink! Except, actually, these were never eaten as "food" per se, but as medicine when the indigenous people wanted to purge. No thanks...

Something sizeable and fast moved across the path ahead of us. "What was that?" I excitedly inquired? Alonzo laughed. "That's a rat." 

The cool red-eyed frog with a nictitating membrane eyelid....like something you might expect from Pan's Labyrinth!

More frogs and a female iguana.

Costa Rican fireflies are bigger than ours - more like beetles - and with two distinct lights at the base of the head.

(Ok, so a close-up of a bug is definitely a bit gross, but also fascinating.)

At a certain point, I lost some of the details of the animals...though I recall this was neither an iguana nor a gecko like what visits us in the bungalow...

Lauren and Everest were being champs about the late night, the scary night-time walk, and the heat/humidity. Everest needed to sit occasionally, and Lauren spent a fair bit of time being carried, but they knew this experience was important to Mindy and me and so they went along with it. Good for them! Until..it was too much. Poor Lauren had a big, aggressive cicada bounce against her face and land on her head, and....even I get a little freaked out by these nearly mouse-sized bugs. She screamed. She cried. She needed a lot of consoling and she buried her face in my shoulder for the rest of the tour. Poor girl! She didn't even look up to say "thank-you" and "good-night" to Alonzo. (Kudos to her for saying "thanks" after all that!) Everest still powered through, but I was more focused on the human in my arms than the other animals around us. 

As you might imagine after a full day like that, bed-time for the kids came swiftly! Mindy and I sat out for a long time listening to the jungle at night. This place is a paradise! (Maybe not quite so for Lauren, but she had long forgotten her trauma before going to sleep.)