Spice Farm

On the final day of adventure, we split up. Pam and the girls went into Jaco to shop, then returned to get Sam and head for the surfboard rental place on the beach. Fred went into town to investigate cigar shops. Nancy, Melissa and Rob headed back south to a spice farm called Villa Vanilla.

Tour-wise, it could have gone either way, but it turned out to be one of the most interesting activities of the trip. Latin America used to be a heavy-hitter in the vanilla industry, but a blight in the early 2000s wiped out virtually all of it. This farm is one of the few places where it survived, due to the owner's reliance on traditional growing methods and refusal to use pesticides.

Vanilla beans during the drying process:

The process is labor intensive. The flower is opened for only one day, and must be manually pollinated. If not, the flower falls off, and no bean for you. Here's a vanilla plant:

Instead of spraying pesticides to deter pests, they intersperse ornamental flowering plants to distract them.

They grow a number of other spices here as well, including allspice, tumeric and cardomon. They also make their own chocolate. Here's our tour guide pointing out a cinnamon tree:

It takes eight years to grow, and they have to cut the whole thing down to harvest it. The cinnamon is in the bark, which you can just eat. Tastes kind of like red hots. This guy is carving the bark:

Cocoa fruit - the beans are inside:

Cocoa beans:

Um, I was told there would be snacks?