Zip Lines and the Organic Coffee Farm

The next day we went on a zip line canopy tour that was way fun. There were 12 lines that we got to go across, but the last one was by far the best. It was a kilometer long, and you had to go with 2 people to have enough weight to make it across. They said you got up to 75km per hour on that line. They also had a Tarzan swing, it was funny watching that one because people freaked out pretty often. After the zip lining, we went around the trails on in the park and saw a few cotamundis. They are like Costa Rican raccoons, one of them was in the trees, maybe looking for ants to eat? Another few were running around the forest and we caught glimpses of them. They're really cool looking, I've never seen an animal like that before and felt pretty lucky to run into a few of them. We ate at a really good pizza restaurant that night, Pizza de Johnny, and then went to the Ranaria, the frog house, where we saw a bunch of really cool frogs and toads, including many poisonous frogs that were really colorful and neat looking, and also these huge frogs that sometimes ate birds. I thought that was pretty crazy, they were about the size of a softball and apparently their tongues are really strong and they can just kill prey that you would think would be much too big for any frog to eat.

The next morning we got up and went on a tour of a coffee farm down the road. It was a really cool place. They not only grew coffee, but they also had banana, plantain, sugar cane, tobacco, papaya, naranjita(?), and a bunch of other plants. It was a really self sufficient place, and it was all owned by one family. The guy that was showing us around told us a bunch of cool stuff about how the coffee growing process works, how sugar is refined, and how bananas are harvested. They showed us every step that has to be taken to make coffee, beginning with picking the beans, peeling them, drying them, and roasting them, it is for sure a really long process that is a lot of work, especially for the coffee pickers. We also got to go on a ride in an ox cart that was hand painted in the traditional Costa Rican way and make our own dulces out of the sugar that was grown at the farm. The sugar was refined by crushing the sugar cane in a press and then boiling down the juice until it turned into a molasses like liquid. We got to take some of the liquid and mix it up on a flat surface to aerate it, and then added peanuts and coconut and let it cool off, it was pretty good stuff. Just pure sugar and those other 2 ingredients, so it was just really sweet. We also got to try juice from the narjanjita fruit (its like a cross between an orange and a lemon and was really good), and coffee fresh from the beans they grew there. It was definitely a cool tour of a farm that produced a lot of different products, and a very educational experience!