Don Olivo’s Chocolate farm has been making chocolate in La Fortuna for 90 years. It is an extremely small operation, run by the son and grandchildren of Don Olivo. Here is a photo as we pulled into the driveway for the farm.
It’s a little hard to see how this family supports itself as, over the course of the tour, Ron and I assessed their daily chocolate output as negligible…perhaps they make enough to fit in a can of Folger’s coffee? The real money must be somewhere else. One thought that comes to mind is that we paid $25 each for this tour and they typically do about 17 tours a day and the per capital income in Costa Rica is about $11,000 and as I type this it is clear that they are not so much farmers as they are savvy entrepreneurs.
But the tour was quite excellent, led by a grandson whose name I cannot recall. His English was pretty good, allowing me to understand about 60% of what he said and this, together with my natural science insight and understanding, allowed me to learn much about the process of making chocolate. Here, for example, is a photo of me taking part in juicing the sugar cane that is mixed with the chocolate.
Here is a photo of the cocoa beans after you pull them from the plant. They look like larvae or mussels and Ron gamely popped one of these into his mouth but I was not having any of that. Don Olivo also distills a sugar rum that they do on the side and the grandson told us not to mention it, nudge nudge wink wink, all chatty and stuff, but that’s my other suspicion as to their profitability. They gave out samples of this rum as well and Ron drank both of ours, which might explain why, soon after, he ate that larvae-looking stuff and pronounced it “tasty”.
The real highlight of this tour, from a chocolate farming point of view, is that there was a baby sloth in the tree as we entered the property, and it was so low down in the tree that I got a rare good picture.
No corn was served to me today and we found a little Italian restaurant just a 10 minute walk from our hotel. I had pizza, which follows up last night’s pasta. It’s important, when traveling abroad, to sample the cuisine of the land.
We’re off to Proyecto Asis in the morning.
Travels with Valerie 