I think we must’ve still been trying to sleep off some of our some of the effects of our red-eye, because everybody slept about 12 hours again. Good thing we went to bed early!
After we woke up, we had a leisurely morning keeping the children away from the pool. So you know, it wasn’t SUu-per leisurely. But we weren’t rushed either.
And then we started off towards our first adventure of the day: a butterfly conservatory that was about 25 minutes away from our Airbnb.
We arrived just as it opened and I went in to get our tickets, and the woman who was working was definitely not the strongest English speaker, so I told her that I speak a little Spanish, and so she explained where things were and how to get around the gardens, all in Spanish, and I totally understood her! Huzzah! I was very excited about that.
When the kids came in, she very kindly showed us the butterflies that had emerged overnight from their cocoons and she acquainted us briefly with the kind of butterflies that are found at the conservatory.
We made our way down the path toward the first habitat, and it was just such a beautiful walk through a jungle-y area. There we met Alora, who would be our guide for the entirety of our time at the conservatory. She is from Florida and works here as a volunteer.
It turns out it’s a sort of volunteer abroad program, where you volunteer to work at a place for a certain amount of time. For this position, you do it for 6-12 months at a time, and you get room and board and a small stipend. So she basically gets to live in Costa Rica for free. Clara basically spent the rest of our time there telling us how she wants to work here.
And I have to say, this was a really cool place. We’ve done butterfly conservatories in multiple places, in particular on our nomad year, they were often a feature of botanical gardens and such. But this one put all of those to shame. There were just so many butterflies!!
And there were a few varieties in particular that frequently land on people, and our guide actually showed us a trick for getting them to land on you: you rub a bit of banana on your fingers and then put your fingers close to the buttterfly. And they will often move onto your hand. And they will eat the banana while they sit on your hand, so that was pretty cool. Clara seems to be a Disney princess. They did not need to be coaxed to go visit her and she was eating it up.
In the second habitat, the butterflies were not as keen to land on us. But these were the show-stoppers! The Morphos are the butterfly that the emoji is based on: 🦋🦋🦋
The third habitat was meant to resemble a highland habitat. It was much cooler and darker than the others. And these butterflies tended to stay pretty close to the ground and also were not as eager to land on us. But the gardens themselves were also incredibly beautiful. Tropical plants are stunners.
A few of our favorite names for the butterflies: Floating tiger, Julia, Postman, glasswing, cattleheart.
Unique thing about the Julia butterflies is that you can often see pictures of them on various animals and they are the faces of various animals and what they are doing is they are drinking their tears.
FROGS
To Logan’s great delight, the conservatory also has a frog habitat. It was small, but had some pretty cool frogs in it. Logan’s two favorite frogs were in the habitats there: the strawberry poison dart frog and the red eyed tree frog.
In the frog habitat with our guide. 
Soon to be tadpoles 
Sleeping Red Eyed tree frog (so no visible red eyes) 
More sleeping red eyed tree frogs 
green-and black poison dart frog 
This red eyed tree frog snuck in from the jungle outside, following the call of his brethren who were in a habitat. 
That is a cockroach. 🤮
We were less delighted by some of the other denizens of the frog house, specifically the cockroaches.
As I mentioned previously, Clara told us about a hundred times that she really wants to work there, but the cockroach thing nearly changed her mind.
TURTLES
After we walked through the frog habitat area, we went and saw the snapping turtles; we saw two babies and one adult. And the kids got to help feed them bread fruit.
At this point, we had seen all of the animal habitats. We had a couple of options. We could do a little hike around the conservatory through the jungle.
But the kids all wanted to go back to the first enclosure one more time, to hold the butterflies. So that’s what we did. It was a pretty quiet day at the conservatory and so the guides were totally fine with that. We nearly had the place to ourselves.
We ended up chatting with our tour guide and another tour guide (Karen) while the kids were enjoying the butterflies. Soon our tour guide went off to lead another tour group. And so we chatted with Karen for a while. She is probably in her 60s and she had been living in Oregon, working at a Walgreens. Basically, she wasn’t all that thrilled with her life so she decided to try something new. She has volunteered at a lot of interesting places since then, including a chocolate farm where she helped make chocolate.
Eventually, we had to cut the kids off, because we had another tour scheduled for today.
We were finally able to pull them away and we made our way back up to the parking area.
Once we got there, I went off to the side of the road to take a picture of the volcano again, and I got attacked by fire ants. I must have stepped in a nest or something. Not my favorite thing. But I did end up with a couple of nice pictures.
We started driving to our next destination. By this point we were all getting hungry, and so we stopped at a Panaderia (a bakery) along the way to grab some deliciousness.
This brought back such fond memories of the Philippines: we often stopped at bakeries for a quick bite as we were traveling around. Jonathan ran into the bakery and procured us some breads and some peach juice and mango juice. We ate in the car and then continued driving towards our next destination: a chocolate-making tour at Two Little Monkeys. It is a family owned and run operation.
I don’t know what Waze was thinking, but we drove the most random route to get there. It was a funny drive. There were a lot of farms and farm animals, and we even ended up on some dirt roads at one point. There were a lot of farms a lot of farm animals, and we were rather concerned that we would not be in the right place, but eventually it managed to spit us out where we were supposed to be, thank goodness.
And it turns out that there is a normal paved road that goes the other direction.
We drove up and got all settled in for our tour, and waited for the second group that would be joining us, they were a lovely family of five from Florida. They had an 18 month old and then two older kids like maybe 8 and 11 or something like that. They were a delightful party to share the tour with. It’s always awkward when parties are mismatched. Like when you have a bunch of single 20 some things and then our family it’s weird. So we were happy it was another family.
Our tour guide, Ismael, owns the farm and makes chocolate for the entire area. He and his family are all about sustainable farming practices and making really good chocolate. Which we sure appreciated!
Ismael did a great job from the beginning of getting us involved in the process. We started by experience the fruit that the cocoa comes from. The seeds/cocoa pods are not edible until they have been processed, but you can eat the pulp, and that part was really delicious. It tasted nothing like chocolate. Just a lovely fruity flavor. The kids were seriously obsessed. Jonas, especially was digging it. He kept calling it delicious slime if that’s any indicator of the texture.
Apparently it is a fairly long process going from beans, to fermentation, roasting, and then grinding.
And we got to see what the chocolate was like at each step. The beans start to resemble chocolate (aroma-wise) once they have been fermented, but they are not edible yet.
Once the beans have been roasted, they are edible and we got to try them. They are called Nibs at this point. The nibs have a really strong, bitter chocolate flavor. I was into it cause I really like dark chocolate.
The nibs are then ground into a paste. And we got to help finish up a couple of batches of beans by repeatedly running them through a little hand grinder and we also got to try doing it with a mortar and pestle. Just to get a feel for what is required.
Once that is done, the next steps are determined by exactly what you want to make: dark chocolate, milk, chocolate, white, chocolate, etc.
(To make dark chocolate or semi sweet or milk chocolate, you just have to get the correct ratio of sugar to processed chocolate to milk, depending on which one you want.)
(To make white chocolate, once the beans have been fermented and roasted, to make white chocolate you press the oil out of the ground and processed beans and you get cocoa butter. You then add sugar and milk and you have white chocolate. We got to rub some of the fresh cocoa butter on our hands and it was a lovely moisturizer and smelled like chocolate.)
The chocolate that we helped to grind up was made into two different things: a traditional ceremonial drink made by indigenous people of Costa Rica and also hot chocolate.
The traditional Costa Rican drink was warm and spicy and was only drunk by people of the highest social classes. It’s not the kind of thing that everybody would like, it’s pretty dark and legitimately spicy, because it contains a number of spices including cayenne and allspice.
My honest initial impression was that I didn’t like it, but it really grew on me the more that I sipped it. Jonathan felt the same way.
The hot chocolate, on the other hand, was the best hot chocolate any of us have ever had. And I have had some amazing hot chocolate in Europe.
It was made with fresh chocolate nib paste, milk and a small amount of raw sugar. Ismael told us that it’s the oils from the nibs that make it so much better than powdered hot chocolate.
I honestly feel like American hot chocolate has tons of sugar added to make up for the fact that the oils are gone.
Next we got to make our own chocolates, using chocolate made by Two Monkeys. We got dark, milk, and white chocolate which we could pipe into molds, and then different garnishes/add ins such as coconut, sprinkles, salt, almonds, etc.
The kids really enjoyed this part. And they were pleased that they had experience with making chocolates. (Thanks to Grandma Urie!)
Jonathan really enjoyed making salty ducks.
Our chocolates needed to be refrigerated and so while we were waiting, we moved on to another activity. We got to juice sugar cane and helped make it into a really delicious drink, which was garnished with star fruit. Star fruit is crazy sour, but I liked it.
Cacao growing on a tree- on the trunk! Interesting, eh? 
Another variety of cacao 
Vanilla is an orchid- I had no idea. (Also it has to be hand pollinated because the original pollinators are extinct. Sad) 
Baby Sloth! It’s mother had just left it (So he’s about 6 months old) 
TOUCAN!! 
THREE-CAN 
Other spices grown at the farm
We then got to go on a little tour of the farm itself. We got to see how cacao fruits grow on cacao trees. Answer: from the trunk of the tree. Isn’t that interesting?
Our guide pointed out the vanilla plants, they are orchids. Who knew? Also, vanilla has to be hand pollinated because the natural pollinators are extinct.
There was a baby sloth in one of the trees too! It was young enough that it’s mother had just left it very recently. She was still even in the tree and we got to see both of them separately.
We also got to see some toucans! We’d seen a few others, but this was definitely the best view we’d had. And we even got a couple of pictures. They were pretty cool to see in person.
As we wandering, we saw a bunch of leaf cutter ants, returning to their nest:
And that was the end of the farm tour. Which was probably a good thing, the sky was looking pretty ominous at this point, and it was even starting to sprinkle. So we headed back to the main area and we got to sample the chocolates that we made. No surprise, they were delicious. And that was the end of our tour.
It was awesome. We really enjoyed it.
Our Floridian tour guide from this morning, who took us through the butterfly houses actually gave us a recommendation for a restaurant near our Airbnb in La Fortuna: Pollo Fortuneño
And it was so delicious, Jonathan got half a chicken with some yummy sides Jonas got a quarter of a chicken the twins got arroz con Pollo Clara got tacos. I got nachos. Logan got ribs. It was all delightful and happily everyone was OK with it. That is not always the case.
We finally made it back to our Airbnb when it was already dark, but the kids wanted to do a night swim, specifically in the rain. So, Jonathan and the kids changed into their swimming suits and they went swimming.
Meanwhile, I got started on laundry; because we packed very light. Laundry was very interesting considering I’ve never used a machine like that before. Basically the washing machine is separated into two compartments: the first one is where the washing occurs. It’s basically just an agitator and you select how long you want it to agitate your laundry, etc. the second compartment is a centrifuge that spins the heck out of your laundry.
It was honestly a little bit tricky to figure out because I had to couldn’t figure out how water was supposed to get in. I finally figured out that there was a spigot that would empty into the basin, and so I threw all our laundry into one big load, and agitated it all and drained it.
Unfortunately the centrifuge was only big enough to handle about a third of the load at a time. The first 2/3 spun with no problems, but the last third just would not start spinning and I never did figure out what the problem was.
At this point, we put the kids to bed.
I ended up wringing the last 1/3 load by hand and then I tossed it in the dryer. Let’s just say that the dryer didn’t sound like a very happy appliance. And as the load continued to dry, it sounded angrier and angrier and screechier and screechier. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and I went into the laundry room to turn it off, and it was nearly deafening.
Needless to say, our laundry was not terribly dry, but it had at least been putting out warm air as it screeched, so they were also not as wet as when I initially put them in. Jonathan and I hung the laundry around the house in the hopes that it would dry at a reasonable rate. And then we went to bed.
What a marvelous day!
