Five of Us Riding Nowhere: Chocolate factory

There’s a cemetery just down the road from our apartment that we walked by every day, it’s full of above ground graves. Like all places, we needed to wash our hands to enter. I suppose it’s good that Costa Rica is taking public health so seriously, even if it’s much too late for the people we were going to see. They also wanted to inspect our bag afterward. We did not steal any bones.

Toucan Rescue Ranch is an amazing nonprofit outside of town that works to rehabilitate animals like toucans, parrots and sloths. They also house a pack of rowdy monkeys, very reminiscent of these guys. The tour guide hates the monkeys and the monkeys hate him. One guy on the tour got a little close and could have lost his phone or hat. The monkeys made faces and showed us their butts over and over again. I now hate them too.

The National Museum of Costa Rica filled in some history for us. It’s housed in a former military site, but since they disbanded their military in 1948, it now has a butterfly pavilion and a nocturnal animal exhibit where the jail once was.

From there, we made chocolates. The Tapir Chocolate Factory hosts small groups to learn how to make chocolate. The history of cacao is fascinating, who knew chocolate comes from a fruit!? Our hosts took us from fruit to finished bar over two hours, walking us step by step through the process. They were patient with our mistakes, which came often, and we each walked out with four personalized bars.

We’ve figured out that Uber is not nearly as illicit as we were led to believe, which is good because we needed to cover more ground. We also needed to get rescued in a torrential downpour. Things ended where they started, with the same Uber driver taking us back to the airport. Like a slightly smoother drug deal, he made us take off our masks and pretend like we’re friends when he dropped us off. This wasn’t hard, he’s our friend in Costa Rica that we’ve known the longest.