It’s been a while since my last post, but we haven’t been idle. Lost of skiing and boat work (in addition to real work) before our big trip to the Galapagos…
Just scheduling the trip has been an adventure (credit to my mother), but 4 years later after countless reschedules, flight issues, and vaccine issues - we were on our way. Our trip began on Tuesday (4/4) with a 6a flight to Denver where we were to meet up with the grandparents for the continuation of the trip. We got to the airport extra early (which turned out to be unnecessary as the flight was delayed by over an hour), but we were all in good spirits - not realizing that the delay was an omen of things to come…
The next morning we were planning on three flights - Denver to Houston to Panama City to Guayaquil - leaving at 6a and arriving at 11:30p. Instead, we left at about 10a and arrived at 8a the following day. Delays on planes arriving, weather diverting the plane from Houston to Austin, and missed connections sending us through Bogata made for a very long day/night… Sara was a trooper and despite over 12 hours of delay, we were all in good spirits when we arrived at the hotel in Guayaquil - although all of us in need of a nap!
The following day (day 4 of the trip, for those who are counting) was to be a tour of a chocolate plantation. After an hour(ish) bus ride, we arrived at a beautiful chocolate plantation/hotel which was sort of half chocolate plantation and half tourist destination. The grounds were beautiful - a lot of effort was spent on landscaping and it showed. The building itself was made of mostly teak - which is a very expensive wood for building a hotel out of but apparently Equador is a huge producer/exporter of teak. We saw expansive teak forests/farms on our bus ride to the farm and lots of teak trees were planted in/around the plantation. These trees take ~25 years to reach maturity for harvest - so it’s a long-term investment - but a single tree can fetch $500+ so it can be profitable if you have the space/time. We also found out how teak oil is made - you extract it from the young leaves by grinding/pressing them until the oil emerges.
We had lunch first, which was delicious and involved all local food - most of it prepared in a traditional way. It have us lots of energy for our walking tour - which was amazing but also very tiring given how hot it was.
Then came the chocolate tour. We got to see all the stages of production, from growth/harvest, to processing, to cooking - and at the end we made our own chocolate bars. The seed pods themselves have a very unique shape, but once you open them you see that the seeds themselves are covered in a white mucus - not much to look at but even the mucus is sweet to taste. The seeds are fermented and cooked and then separated into coco nibs and the coco butter. The butter and ground nibs are then recombined and heated/cooled to create the standard chocolate bar. As you can see, Angela was our lead chef but we each added some flavouring to make our own unique chocolate bars.
After the tour, Sara wondered the grounds for a while and found a cool (teak of course) tree house. There were flowers of all shapes and varieties - most of which I had not seen before. They also had their own cow pastures for milk (for chocolate) making the plantation and end to end production.
On our bus ride back we heard about the Guayaquil tram (apparently public transit connecting two towns) but the population doesn’t trust it so it’s really only ridden by tourists) and a failed train tour from Guayaquil to the Andes in the highlands of Equador - a government project that skipped some of the important market research. Back to the hotel for a fondue dinner and sleep before we head to the boat tomorrow!