Monteverde

After Arenal, we visited the Monteverde Cloud Forest area. First, we visited a local coffee farm to learn about how coffee, chocolate, and sugar are made!

Here I am with Don Juan, the owner of the family farm we visited.

A ripening coffee bean on the branch

Green coffee beans, after being dried but still in their shells

Green coffee beans, sorted by weight. After this, they are roasted and ground for consumption.

This is the cacao fruit! There is a tangy, sweet flesh around each cacao bean.

 Here is the dried cacao bean, still in its shell.

 And the shelled cacao bean, broken into nibs.

I drink coffee and eat (lots of) chocolate, and it was pretty nifty to see where things come from and how they are processed. I basically have no idea how anything is made in the real world, so I learned a lot of new things.

We also embarked on a particularly (for me) adventurous activity in Monteverde: ziplining! I would never skydive or bungee jump; I think ziplining is probably my limit. We whizzed through the tree canopy at pretty high speeds – not good for spotting wildlife, but beautiful in other ways. There were something like 14 separate cables, and we moved from platform to platform, culminating in a cable that is 1 km long! I spent most of the time yelling, "EEEEEEE!!"

And finally, a few pictures from our hikes in the cloud forest. Because the forest is usually bathed in clouds, moss and other kinds of epiphytes can grow on everything. The vegetation is incredibly dense and the very air seems almost alive. It was quite magical to hike through it on a quiet day.

Look at how the trees above seem to shape their own growth with reference to the surrounding trees! Almost like puzzle pieces. I had no idea...