Warned off of the advertised chocolate making tours posted around town, we asked Eric, our host at the veg-owned Cashew Hill Jungle Lodge in Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica, for an alternative. On a small piece of paper he sketched out a rough map and sent us to to see how an indigenous Bribri family a few kilometers down the road make chocolate.
Securing the hoods of our coats against steady rain, my friends and I headed for town in search of someone willing to drive us out to the chocolate house. It had been raining for a week. The roads, which rank as moderately treacherous at their best, had turned into sinking muddy minefields of holes full of calf-deep water, a fact we knew well having walked ourselves into Puerto Viejo several nights ago from the lonely Bar Pen where our bus had stopped, unable to take us any further. Walking down to the swollen sea, crashing gray against the beach that had been reduced to a slick wet strip of dark sand between road and water, we roused some reluctant attention from a group of men sitting under a porch awning near the deserted bus stop. "¿Taxi?"
"Si. Hola señor. ¿Sabe donde está la casa del cacao cerca de Bribri?"
He did, más o menos as it turned out, but we were off, piling into his old brown car and bouncing down the road as Afro-Caribbean ballads trickled through the fuzzy radio. Receiving some unwelcome spinal adjustments, we ricocheted around the car as it traversed the temporary bridge that stood in for the one which had been washed out in the rains, muddy water splashed up around us as our pirate taxi continued to carefully pick out a path on the pitted road. But as we pressed on down the road, it seemed that the rain was breaking. Watercolor pale brushes of blue were bleeding out of the gray sky. We smiled at each other and experimentally shook off our raincoats. Things were looking up, we were on our way to learn about chocolate.
Expertly negotiating a left hand turn as the sun boldly broke out of a clump of gray clouds, we jangled down a few more kilometers of road to find ourselves exiting the car at a small dirt driveway leading down to Cacao House on the edge of the Talamanca Jungle. Taking the driver's cell number and promising to call him if we needed a hair-rising ride back into town, but silently praying that the weather would hold and a walk back into Puerto Viejo would seem like an adventure, we clamored down hill to be greeted by the family and taken around to explore their cacao operation.
Their home was set in front of a hillside dense with cacao trees. All around us, the family pointed to the cacao fruit ripening. Here a bright yellow fruit, there a knobbled green one, softly purple striped fruit rubbed against ripened orange ones. On the hillside, monkeys and birds rustled. The owner shooed them from afar and gently cursed the monas who were always stealing her cacao.
When people express surprise that I, as a vegan, eat chocolate (I guess because chocolate seems inextricably connected to milk or cream for many), I always explain that chocolate is made primarily from a fruit. It comes as a surprise to many, but even knowing as I do about the cacao pods and their translucent fleshy seeds which can be transformed into sublime confections, it is amazing to hold a cacao fruit in your hand and realize that it is the building block of all those dark bars of chocolate.
Inside the banana leaf-lined workshop, we were treated to a view of the whole process of transforming the cacao fruit into chocolate. Though the Bribri people traditionally used cacao more for more medicinal applications than enjoyment, they did, and do, consume some mind-altering delicious hot chocolate made simply with cacao paste, raw cane sugar and water. Some, like the family we visited, do now produce chocolate "bars" for sale outside their community. These tiny bars, made with ingredients harvested around their land, like nutmeg, coconut, ginger and mint, are what we got to see being made.