Ashore - Puntarenas, Costa Rica

It’ll do

The next port stop was in Costa Rica.  We booked an excursion with the cruise company to a coffee plantation and some local stuff. They had me at ‘coffee plantation’; I seek the mother lode.

Get in my veins

We had another very keen tour guide who took us up a mountain via coach to the plantation.  Mango, papaya and banana trees are absolutely everywhere in the country, alongside most roads, but especially bordering coffee plantations as they maintain crop diversity so as not to deplete soil nutrition. See, I was listening.
 
When we got there, the local tour guide from the plantation took over, showing us around the grounds and the associated works.  We saw some of the day labourers coming in to pick the coffee, almost all of whom were Guatemalan and Nicaraguan (it pays literally twice as much here as back home), as Costa Ricans never deign to pick the coffee themselves, regardless of how much they might need the money.  The guide said it’s a pride thing. Whatevs.  I did ask whether it was a particularly technical job, requiring a lot of training, but she replied: “Nah, just pick the red ones and don’t drop any.”

Best leave these a while.

She also showed us how to make coffee properly: by straining it through a linen sock, apparently.  It’s a method I’d yet to try, so I’ll be sure to buy one and add it to the pile of paraphernalia in the coffee cupboard when I get back.

“If you don’t make it in a sock, you are an ignorant dickhead who deserves to sip weak Horlicks in the corner like a twat” – verbatim quote

She informed us how Costa Rica provides only a small fraction of the worlds coffee, being far outstripped by Brazil and Colombia, and so tries to make up with it in quality.  Hence every bean being handpicked, compared to the heavy mechanisation of the process in their neighbouring competitors.   This plantation had the full turn-key set up from raw bean to roasting:

 
  
Pictured: Magic happening

They also showed us their ox cart, which has some significance to them because it represents the means they used to use to take their beans to market back in the day.

Huh.

We learned that they used American-type spoked-wheel carts originally, but they proved unworkable on the local moist soil and so they ended up using solid wheels. After that they started painting the carts up like some kind of psychedelic fever dream.   This leads us gracefully to the other half of the tour: to Sarchi, a local town famous for still making these ox carts for all sorts of decorative and ceremonial reasons.  They’ve got the largest one in the world in fact (I’m not sure how much competition there possibly could have been, mind):

It certainly is big

The staff in the shop plied us with fruit and gave us a tour of the facilities.  They’ve got the original waterwheel-powered workshop still working, but I’m pretty sure they just turn it on for tourists.  Most of the craftspeople we saw were the artists employed to do the paint work. It is rather impressive work.  Big on parrots and fruit, mind.

  

This was a better stop in that we didn’t pine to be let off the lead for a couple of hours. 
Oh, their hours of daylight are 6am-6pm every day, all year, which was odd to imagine. And their seasons consists of: raining and hot, and not raining and hot.   It seems a nice place and we’d come back and see a bit more in the future, I reckon.  The gangs of feral dogs didn’t maul us and/or give us rabies either, so that’s a feather in their cap.

“Yeah, I’d keep on walking, pasty-legs”

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir haben einer costaricanischen Kaffeeplantage besucht.  Es ist wichtig, dass ich woher mein Lebenselixier kommt zu entdecken.