I elected to skip the 8am hike and instead sleep in a little bit, grab breakfast, and just hang out. Kenny astutely pointed out the previous evening, “you’re going to be in Jackson hole again, but when are you ever going to stay in a resort?” So I opted to take advantage of that.
Spent the morning and early afternoon hanging around the hotel waiting with the rest of the team to leave, then headed into town. Met up with Jin, Natasha, and Justin, grabbed dinner at Local. Perfectly fine but otherwise unremarkable.
After dinner they picked up their rental van for driving up to Yellowstone, and I went to bed.
Got up just in time to grab breakfast at nine, then went for a hike up one of the ski slopes behind the resort. Between the altitude and the elevation, I was sucking wind, but still managed to keep up with the group from Boulder.
Saw something bird like scurry across the path, which turned out to be a grouse!
Flying skunk?
We got closer to it and snapped a couple photos, then accidentally scared it off, pro,print it to roost in a tree that we then noticed happened to contain a bear cub. So we backed way the hell off and took pictures of it from afar. On our way down the hill, we saw the mother checking us out with the cub playing around her feet.
We grabbed lunch at a thai restaurant (thai seems disproportionately popular in Jackson) then got on the bus to go rafting. It was good fun, mostly class two and three, cold, but not miserable. After getting back we grabbed dinner, a hot shower, then headed into town.
I shit you not, they had saddles for bar stools
I was in bed by 12:30, but a good time was had by all!
The flight out of SFO was delayed by two something hours, which put us in SLC an hour after our connecting flight left for JAC, so after what I’m sure were a bunch of frantic calls between the travel agent(s), delta, and Dawn (the admin arranging everything) Delta chartered an extra flight to JAC for us! So that worked out well.
In the time waiting around the airport for people to resolve things (thanks everyone!) I reworked my Norway to JFK flight to at least give me a chance of making the JFK to Austin leg, talked with Rob about who’s paying June rent and how.
The flight to SLC was mostly unremarkable, except for the kid in the row in front of me who lost his shit the poor guy did not want to sit in his seat. He wanted to sit next to daddy! He was so upset he sounded like he was going to puke a few times. Rough. 20 minutes into the flight he passed out, though, so easy. Otherwise, just worked on transcribing for the web ahead.
Salt Lake really is just a giant salt lake. From the air, it looks totally dead and like just a wasteland.
Maybe pretty from a certain perspective, but paradise is a bit of a stretch.
Weird.
Flight into JAC was easy. Walked off the plane, picked up our bags off the tarmac and walked onto a waiting charter bus. Which broke down multiple times on the way to the hotel. As we passed through town, the bus was enveloped in a large cloud of what smelled like coolant. After that, we limped forward a quarter mile at a time, with the engine cutting out us, pulling over the bus restarting. It finally died an ignoble death on the side of the road near a river where it idled itself dead. The hotel then rolled taxis to get us the last few miles.
Once at the hotel, we ate dinner, talked, drank, and played cards till almost 4am.
Woke up early, around seven, and lazed about reading. Eventually packed, then took a car to Chelles, a 24/7 restaurant purported to be open for over a century. Gallo pinos con huevos y carne. Great. After breakfast, we walked around San Jose, hit up a panaderia, then went back to the house to pick up our bags, then to the airport.
Woke up around four, took a taxi to a bus to the Cairo operations center of Rios Tropicales. Had a god day great cup of coffee, breakfast, then rafted the whole day. It was pretty great.
Zip lining, then some pretty awesome hiking. Our guide, Daniel, clearly took a liking to Amy. At dinner that night, (Daniel’s recommendation, Soda ???) showed up. We bet Amy a dollar to run him down and kiss him. She didn’t. We were sad.
I think we’re getting old. We started the day by continued the previous day’s trend of doing nothing and lounged around the house most of the the morning. I woke up around seven, finished my book, then ate breakfast around 8:30 or 9. Tiffany discovered a chocolate plantation tour, which we jumped on, which gave us the timeline for the day. I jumped in the shower, shaved (finally!) and then we set out for Arenal.
Holy shit! It's a volcano!
I realized part way through the hike, as a child I dreamed of seeing places like this! It’s incredible! As a child, I was in love with the idea of rain forests: the density and diversity of life, the sheer greeness of it. incredible.
green. also, some fungus
Half way rough, we came across this ficus with the most immense root structure I’ve ever seen. I’m sure I
I’m sure I’ve seen larger redwoods,mount the presence of this tree was remarkable! Just huge.
No sloths thought, so the whole morning was a waste.
After hiking, we took a lazy drive back to town and got coffee from the Rainforest Cafe. It’s my goal to get Amy at least amenable to coffee by the end of the trip.
It was called the Self-pleasure. I didn't question and just went for itThe menu in question
Post coffee, we went to Rain Forest Chocolate Tour, which was incredible. They walked us through the entire, complex process that happens just to produce a tiny amount of chocolate:
After ripening on the tree, cocoa pods are harvested and cracked open. At this point, the seeds taste extremely bitter and not at all pleasant. The meat around the seeds is mucousy and tastes most similar to guavanaba.
The seed pods are removed and allowed to ferment for seven days. The fermentation process leaves the seeds free from the meat and helps break down the flavonoids in the seeds.
After fermenting, the seeds are laid out to dry until they’re at about 40% of their original water content. At this point, the taste of the seed is recognizably chocolate, but still bitter and raw. After this stage, the seeds are stable enough to be transported off the plantation to be further processed.
The seeds are then roasted at 240°C for about ten minutes, and then mashed to allow the shell to Be separated from the meat of the bean. The bits of bean are finally something we’d recognize: cocoa nibs
The nibs are then processed (or not) depending on the desired final product, typically mixed with sugar, ground fine, mixed with milk solids, and formed into bars.
What was surprisingly cool was how complicated cocoa plantations are:
it takes five years from the time a cocoa tree is planted to the time a mature cocoa pod can be harvested
plantations are necessarily biodiverse, both to survive the first years until the trees start to bear fruit, but also because the cocoa trees themselves require it: bananas for shade, butterflies and other insects to pollinate, other plants to spurt the insects, small mammals to help keep populations in check and support tree growth…
because of this, plantations are almost always small, one or two hectacre outfits, with each hectacre capable of producing a metric ton of cocoa. A metric ton goes for roughly $3500 US, which, in Costa Rica, doesn’t go very far. All of the money is in processing. Luckily (for Costa Rican farmers, at least) the cocoa trees that grow in Costa Rica produce the highest grade cocoa. This allows them to survive even though Africa far outpaces them in cocoa production.
We then tried a few different. Kinds of chocolate, as a drink like it was originally enjoyed by the Mayan elite, then later after Lindt and Nestle had their ways with it (making it melt-able and easier to access, respectively). We ate ourselves to just shy of sickness.
I bought a few bars of chocolate produced by a local women’s cöop, then we heeded home, made dinner, and kept it low key.
