Costa Rica: Farm Life

Leaving Bolita and Puerto Jimenez behind, we headed north towards the central valley of Costa Rica and a small town out of the city Grecia.

There will be our next workaway experience on a farm. We were always liking the idea to liveo in a farm and now would be great chance to test ourselves. This farm cultivates, among others, coffee as well. In general the whole area has ideal climates and altitudes for growing coffee, so it would be very important for us, as coffee lovers, to go deep to the whole production process, from plant until the processing of roasting the bean.

The ''Finca''

Saturday noon and we arrived in the farm welcomed by Angel. Angel is the caretaker of the farm; he lives with his family and works in the farm the last 20 years. With Angel we would spend much time together in the next five weeks, working with him almost all morning, as also he would teach us a little bit of Spanish.

Our private cabin

Angel led us to our cabin, there we met an other couple of volunteers. Once we settled and tidied up our stuff, the farm owner, Frank, came to meet us. Frank is a 60+ American (called gringos for the locals) who owns the farm for over the last 11 years. After meeting him, he asked us to teach him some Greek words and also he suggested us, if we wanted and we had enough energy, to join him the evening at the nearest village where they had a carnival parade. Without second though, we accepted his proposal, as we couldn't lose the opportunity to attend a local event that will get us to meet the culture of the locals, this is one of the purposes of our trip.

Carnival parade

The evening we headed with Frank in the central square. There a lot of people started gathering and we dawdle the fancy costumes of Carnival, and there it was, a little surprise waiting for us. Suddenly we hear:

- Hey "Do you speak Greek"

Opa, yes we heard correctly, Greek in depth of Costa Rica. At that time Frank called us in order to introduce us to his friend Leo

- '' Hey how are you '' says Leo in broken Greek and we start all together laughing.

Leo is a Tico (Costa Rican man), as he told us he used to live for many years in Astoria, in New York. There his first years was working with Greeks, so he first learnt Greek and then English. Farewell Leo told us that he was delighted for the opportunity to speak Greek again and invited us to his house whenever we wanted.

After the farewell we followed the parade, which ended in a small fair and with a small rodeo in the middle.

The fair

The Monday early morning all the volunteers met with Angel to start the various tasks we had to do on the farm. Then to our great disappointment, they informed us that the picking of coffee ended a few days ago and we were a bit of embittered because it was the main reason that we chose this farm. So our only occupation with coffee plants was pruning and cleaning them in order to be prepare them for the wet season that was coming. Besides the pruning of trees, other main tasks were the undertaken cleaning of the paths from the leaves and the general preparation of the farm for the wet season.

Effie pruning the plantain trees

In the farm except from the coffee they cultivated avocados, bananas, plantain trees, orange trees and many other strange fruits that we did not know of their existence

Guanábana fruit

Every day we were helping in the farm five hours per day in the morning (an hour break for porridge) and then we were free usually to relax, cook and sometImes we walk around.

Reina the ''Porridge Chef'', Food styling by Effie

The Weekends usually we had the opportunity to explore the surrounding villages of Grecia, the Atena, and Naranjo.

Grecia was interesting for us just because of the name itself, since as Greeks wanted to see commons of Central American version with that of Europe.

It worths noting that according to the National geographic, Atena is located in the top 10 places in the world with the best climates.

At Naranjo with the namesake coffee, there is one of the most interesting coffee tours in Costa Rica and where we tested one of the best coffees.

Our last Sunday of our stay in the farm happened to be the Catholic Easter where we were guests at the home of Leo to celebrate with them with barbecue and local delicacies, for us it was an opportunity to get to meet the habits and celebrations of Easter like the locals.

The dessert

The next day would have to say goodbye to the farm and drive to the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, this time for holidays. Our experience with Workaway and voluntary work just ended but more adventure in Costa Rica will continue a little longer!

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