6/18 -- Travel to San Gerardo de Dota

We took the public bus into the town of Quepos and walked around, learning about the history. 

There is not much to the town

There are a couple marinas (above and below).

However, it used to be a major spot for the United Fruit Company
(Chiquita Bananas) until some pest wiped out all the banana
acreage. This was the train depot and there is talk of making it
into a museum. The bananas were replaced by palm oil trees
which is the current big business.

Our bus picked us up and drove us to a Villa Vanilla, an organic vanilla/chocolate/spice plantation nearby. We spent a couple hours there learning about vanilla and chocolate cultivation and chocolate bar making. They only use 5 ingredients: fermented chocolate, brown sugar, vanilla, water, and their local spices. They called it the original process, but unlike the Sicilians, who also claim to be original, this chocolate is heated after the addition of the sugar, so it melts and has a much smoother texture than the Sicilian variety. We hiked through the plantation to a dining platform, overlooking their valley, and sampled cheesecake, ice cream, and a hot chocolate served like Turkish coffee. The heat and humidity were horrible again and I was very happy to get back on the air conditioned bus. It is hard to imagine being able to adapt to the lowland climate there.

Red ginger is sometimes pink

Scraping two layers of bark off of cinnamon branches

Cacoa pod with lots of beans inside

Vanilla orchid vine -- they let it grow on trees
they trim to keep hand-pollination manageble.

Torch Ginger

A little bitty pineapple, like the ones we saw
in Tahiti

Juvenile vanilla beans

Starfruit -- really delicious

Only about a quarter of their plantation is farmed. They served us
cheesecake, ice cream with chocolate sauce, and hot cocoa
from this dining platform.

Lunch was at a restaurant overlooking the Pacific in an area where there were few beaches. Low tide featured wide plains of flattish stone. 

We headed west back over the mountains  toward  San Gerardo de Dota, to a valley that is home to many quetzals. We stopped at a grocery store, and later, a coffee shop with several hummingbird feeders, until we turned off the main road. 

The road to our hotel, 3000 feet below was only 7Km long, but it was a lot like many of our roads here – one lane with 2 way traffic and some parking. It felt like it took forever, but it was probably 30 to 45 minutes. We ended up at the Saverge Lodge, a hotel founded by two brothers who married two sisters.

The food was better than usual because of their French-trained chef. I had the wonderful onion soup to start and had to bail when my pepper tenderloin arrived because I was so stuffed from all the other eating. Our amazing bus driver, Julio, was more than happy to take over from me when I bailed out early.