Sweet Maria's Coffee

Sweet Maria's Coffee

 

 

Costa Rica

If there is a problem with Costa Rica coffee, it's the fact that it can lack distinction; it is straightforward, clean, softly acidic, mild. It has lots of "coffee flavor." The trend in Costa Rica was to create large volumes of moderately good "specialty" coffee. There was a push toward high-yield coffee shrubs that lacked the clarity in cup flavor of the older types. They also required a lot of fertilizer input to maintain their bountiful yields. The large mills mixed all the small-farm coffee cherries that were delivered, the high-grown and low-grown, the ripe fruits and the not-so-ripe. The result was mediocrity.

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We currently offer these unroasted coffees:

Costa Rica Tarrazu Dota Providencia

Costa Rica La Candelilla Ave Del Paraiso

 

 

 

Authentic Costa Rica souvenirs in Guanacaste - Costa Rica Message Board - TripAdvisor

Authentic Costa Rica souvenirs in Guanacaste - Costa Rica Message Board - TripAdvisor

New Drake Bay luxury hotel totally sweet

Cortesía de Tico Times

New Drake Bay luxury hotel totally sweet

Posted: Friday, March 01, 2013 - By Lindsay Fendt

Asian themed cabins generate a feeling of exotic luxury at Copa de Arbol. 

 

Lindsay Fendt

This new, upscale collection of cabinas features Asian inspired design and a very chic restaurant.

 

Like most of the visitors to Corcovado National Park, I was more than happy to contend with high humidity, scalding temperatures and my skin’s exposure to more than 6,000 species of insects residing outside of my tent to experience the stunning landscape and exotic animal sightings in one of the most biodiverse places on Earth.
While I’m no stranger to roughing it, what I did not realize, covered in dirt, lying in a puddle of my sweat, was how drastically air conditioning and silky sheets at Drake Bay’s Copa de Arbol would change my appreciation for my surroundings and, honestly, my general outlook on life the following evening.
The newcomer on the Drake Bay hotel scene, Copa de Arbol is the clear front-runner for the most lavish lodgings in town. Its eight air-conditioned cabins are decked out with glossy wooden floors and faux-palm roofs to make you feel perfectly at home in the jungle, while the Asian decor generates a feeling of exotic luxury. Each cabin has its own balcony, allowing guests to soak up the spectacular views of the beach and rain forest.

Room at Copa de Arbol Hotel.
Lindsay Fendt

Meals are all included at Copa de Arbol and, while the selection is limited, the simple casados are well executed and delicious.  From the open-air restaurant, visitors can also head up to a third-floor lounge overlooking the bay.
Opened in May, Copa de Arbol had been in the works for 10 years, according to its owners, native Californians Mike Michaelsen and Jason Tress. The hotel’s Playa Caletas address, an area only accessible by boat or rigorous jungle trek, was a significant obstacle during its construction, especially when building the pool.
The glorious three-tiered infinity pool sits right in the middle of the property and boasts the only hot tub in town. Though the hotel had to shut down for a month to install it, the owners have no regrets about the time investment.
“If you do this, you intend to do a good job,” Michaelsen said. “Vacations are what photo albums are full off, people work really hard to get the time off and the money to do that and they are trusting you. You can’t screw that up.”
During my stay I was hard-pressed to find a screw-up, and Copa de Arbol walks the fine line of eco-lodge and high-class hotel with ease, allowing Drake Bay’s thundering wilderness do most of the talking.
The views are everywhere, but to really get a feel for the surroundings, guests can hit up one of the hotel’s private hiking trails or swing in a hammock at the easily accessible beach. The Caletas area is known for its secluded coves, and a walk down the coastline is sure to lead to the discovery of a swimming-hole hideaway.
“Here you can have a sloth fall into your lap at breakfast, and in October the whale watching is incredible.” Michaelsen said. “This area does a whole lot of the work for you, because it tends to exceed people’s expectations.”
Going There: 
Copa de Arbol is located in Drake Bay. The fastest way to get there is to fly from San José to Drake Bay, and the hotel provides shuttle service. Guests with rental cars can make the 4.5-hour drive to Sierpe and park there for $6 a day.
Prices at Copa del Arbol range from $200 per person in the low season to $280 during the holiday season for a deluxe cabin and $220-$300 for a luxury cabin. Children get a discount starting at $140. The price includes one night, three meals, kayaks and stand up paddle boards.

 

 

 

Over the trees and far away

May 7 2013 at 06:00pm
By DUNCAN GUY 

 

Engineer Mark Brown gets ready to go on a canopy 

 tour with his five-year-old daughter, Devon.

Pretoria - For South African engineer Mark Brown developing zip-line or canopy tours has been a long journey, which has involved detours from surfing waves,to making sandwiches.

Brown, 40, of Durban, was surfing around Central America when he got work on a canopy tour in Costa Rica.

 

“I realised this was an amazing thing to take back to South Africa. It gave me a reason to come home after two years.”

Money was always a problem, but not an insurmountable one, for the intrepid Brown, who cut his travel costs by hitch-hiking to Buenos Aires to catch the cheapest flight home.

Then, once he had identified the Tsitsikamma Forest as the ideal spot to set up a ride, he had to wait a year to get the go-ahead from the government to operate.

He also had to earn more money, so he started a sandwich-making business in Cape Town.

Once back in the forest, he got to work designing a tree-friendly rig, that was an improvement on what he had seen in Coast Rica.

“There was no penetration. No damage. Not a nail or a screw.

“We used rubber pads and water blocks.

“If you were to loosen it, the forest would still be pristine.”

Brown says the value of a canopy experience is that 70 percent of forest life – the spiders, the birds – live in the canopy layer.

He credits Ed Perry, aUS biologist in Costa Rica, for developing a pulley system to give him access to canopies.

Then it was taken to the eco-tourism level, “so that everybody should have the joy of being in this previously inaccessible realm of nature”.

 

His company, Canopy Tours, has six franchises – in the Karkloof and the Champagne Castle area of the Drakensberg in KwaZulu-Natal; the Magaliesberg in North West; the Tsitsikamma in the Western Cape; Magoebaskloof in Limpopo; and Malolotja in Swaziland.

Each is unique. The Tsitsikamma route has 700-year-old yellowwood trees; some platforms on the Karkloof route are on steel towers for the lack of Tsitsikamma-like trees; there are ledge walks along a cliff face on the Drakensberg and Malolotja routes; and the Magaliesberg route is over the world’s second-oldest mountain range.

Brown remembers how difficult it was to access a rock pool below a waterfall, over which there is now a cable on the Magoebaskloof tour.

“To get to it we had to jump off a waterfall, swim over the pool, climb up some rocks and abseil down a cliff.”

By December, Brown hopes to have another franchise up and running in the Western Cape’s Hottentots Holland Nature Reserve.

Its opening will mark the 10th anniversary of his enterprise.

“Hottentots Holland has a forested bowl and two waterfalls that are inaccessible.

“There’s also lots of fynbos and there’ll be a bridge over a waterfall between two cliffs.”

Safety is obviously the top priority, and Brown says his franchise prides itself on its routes being “over-designed”.

“I always get a third-party engineer to sign them off and do a double-check.

“The cables can handle 11 tons. They can easily lift a car.”

Then there’s maintenance on a daily, weekly and six-monthly basis – the last of which Brown does himself.

 

During their daily inspections, guides are generally on the lookout for any possible damage caused by rock falls or lightning strikes.

Brown says another “magic part of it all” is that the guides are people found in areas around the tours, who were once unemployed and unskilled.

 

“They have become the hosts. It wasn’t planned that way – it just worked out that way.”

On the nitty-gritty front, Brown says he has been working with the Department of Labour to develop industry standards.

 

More fun are his plans to extend the Karkloof ride by three additional runs, introduce tours at full moon and develop a treehouse on a cliff face in which people can stay. - Pretoria News

Chanel No.5 Perfume from a Tree? It's the Ylang Ylang from Costa Rica!

Chanel No.5 Perfume from a Tree? It's the Ylang Ylang from Costa Rica!

An interesting article of always professional Kimberly Barron from her blog Eye on costa Rica

Cahuita

This is an article from the Washington Post. They have all the rights to it. I'll be willing to take it down at a moment notice if needs be.

Home

Lazy days on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast

By Paige McClanahan,April 04, 2013

 

 

 A chorus of howling half-human cries jolted us awake on the first morning of our little Caribbean vacation. It wasn’t the kind of wake-up call that we were expecting (we weren’t expecting one at all), and it took me a minute of fumbling in the pre-dawn darkness just to remember where I was.
And there it was again: a cacophony of bellowing, rasping roars that seemed to be coming from just outside the door of our bungalow.
Then it dawned on me: howler monkeys.

Details: Cahuita, Costa Rica
My husband and I were in Cahuita, a lazy, out-of-the-way beach town tucked down near the southern end of Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. We’d driven from the capital, San Jose, the day before and settled into our jungle hideaway just before dark. We were expecting to have a good long sleep — not to be startled awake at 4:30 in the morning. But in Cahuita, as it turns out, that’s all part of the experience.

I admit that I had hesitated to add Cahuita to our itinerary in Costa Rica — but not because of the threat of howling monkeys. Rightly or wrongly, I tend to associate Caribbean vacations with cruise ships, midnight buffets and all-inclusive resorts. We’d come to Costa Rica to do outdoorsy adventure stuff — whitewater rafting, hiking up volcanoes, zip-lining through the cloud forest — not to lounge on a crowded beach sipping overpriced cocktails.
But Cahuita wouldn’t be like that, or so we’d been assured by a couple of friends who knew the area. In Cahuita, they’d said, we’d discover the Caribbean as it was meant to be.
And so we did — howler monkeys and all.
A deep South feel
When we pulled into Cahuita on that first afternoon, it was immediately clear that this isn’t your typical tourist beach town. The place has an old-village feel, with ramshackle wooden buildings, gravel streets and kids tooling around on their bikes. We took a quick stroll through town to get our bearings and saw people sitting out on their front porches, having a drink and watching the world go by.
It might have been those front porches, but to me the place seemed to have strong overtones of the deep South — the Florida panhandle, or maybe the Georgia coast. That sort of connection would kind of make sense, given the region’s history. An Afro-Caribbean fisherman named William Smith was the first person to settle in Cahuita back in 1828. Other fishermen followed, and the area slowly developed into a fishing community with a strong Afro-Caribbean heritage.
Today, Spanish is spoken alongside an English-based patois, and salsa music mixes with reggae on the radio airwaves. Local restaurants serve such classic Costa Rican dishes as gallo pinto (rice and beans), but you can also find spicy jerk chicken and other Caribbean staples. Those same cultural influences are evident up and down Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast: Limon, Cahuita’s province, is the most culturally diverse region in the country.

We didn’t have too much time before dark, so on that first afternoon of our visit, we decided to head straight for the area’s star attraction: Cahuita National Park, whose main entrance lies at the far end of the village.
We checked in at the park gatehouse, a little wooden hut on the edge of a sandy beach, and set off down the 5-mile trail that winds along the park’s coast. We were walking in the shade of palms, strangler figs and mahogany trees, but we could still see glimpses, and sometimes full views, of the glittering ocean on our left.
Just 6.5 square miles covering both land and sea, plus another 86 square miles of marine area, Cahuita National Park is one of the smaller reserves in Costa Rica’s extensive network of protected areas. But the park, which was first brought under government protection in 1970, packs a lot into its modest acreage, encompassing tropical rain forest, mangrove swamps and the country’s largest coral reef. It’s home to monkeys, iguanas, toucans, herons, sea turtles and an impressive array of venomous snakes.
We didn’t manage to spot all that wildlife in our 90-minute stroll as the sun went down. But we did have a few sightings: a furry gray three-toed sloth taking a nap (a long one, we suspected) in the crook of a tree trunk; a heron standing watch over a little cove; and white-faced capuchin monkeys rustling in the canopy overhead. And then, just as we were about to leave the park, an agouti — a little rodent that looks like the confused, energetic offspring of a squirrel and a Chihuahua — skipped across the trail ahead of us.
Not a bad start for our first two hours, I thought.
Pedaling along
We were up early the next morning, thanks to that ear-splitting monkey wake-up call. We decided to take full advantage of the long day and drive down to Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, a somewhat larger coastal town about 10 miles to the south.

While Cahuita is rustic and sleepy, Puerto Viejo is rustic and lively, a veritable little party town stretched out along the coast. With plenty of foreigners wandering around in their swimsuits and flip-flops, it had an unmistakable tourist vibe. But still, we saw no signs of chain hotels, and there weren’t any cruise ships lining the bay.
We wanted to rent a couple of bikes, which was easy enough to arrange at one of the half-dozen bike shops lining Puerto Viejo’s main street. The cost for a full-day rental: $5 apiece.
All geared up with our pastel-colored bikes, we headed south out of town, on the smooth, narrow road that parallels the coast. For the first mile or so, we passed clusters of guesthouses, gift shops and cafes. But then the buildings dwindled, and the jungle grew thicker on either side of the road. The late-morning sun was warm on our sweaty backs, and the air was heavy with humidity and the dense smells of forest and flowering trees.
We pedaled all the way to the end of the road, and we were so enamored of the journey that when the pavement turned into a sandy trail, we parked the bikes and started to walk. We’d reached the village of Manzanillo, a tiny outpost less than 10 miles from the border with Panama. But beyond Manzanillo, there’s no road to the border — only a faint trace of a footpath that snakes its way through the remote Gandoca-Manzanillo National Wildlife Reserve.
After locking our bikes to a tree, we set off on foot on the path along the coast, keeping our eyes peeled for toucans, kingfishers and other birds that we hadn’t yet managed to spot. But the walking didn’t last long: Within about 30 minutes, the path died out — or so it seemed to us — on a hidden little curve of sand that was empty except for a few crabs that quickly scurried into their holes. So we scrapped the idea of a walk, dropped our bags and went for a beautiful warm-water swim.
We took our time riding back to Puerto Viejo that afternoon and returned the bikes just as darkness began to fall. Hungry and thirsty after all that time in the sun, we grabbed a table at the Lazy Mon, a beachside bar with a distinctly reggae feel, and settled in for a couple of hours of plain old chilling out. We ordered mango margaritas — two for the price of one — and dove into a heaping plate of handmade tortilla chips and fresh guacamole. The band crooned “No Woman, No Cry” as the sea breeze rustled the palms overhead.
Did it feel like a Caribbean cliche? Oh, yes. In the very best way possible.

Swimming with the fishes
 We had one final morning in Cahuita, and we wanted to use it well. So we signed up for that quintessential Caribbean activity, snorkeling, in Cahuita’s coral reefs.
Spread across about 1,500 acres, the coral reef in Cahuita National Park is the largest of its kind in Costa Rica. The reef was damaged in an earthquake that struck the area in 1991, but it has been recovering well, thanks in large part to the protection that the park affords.
Just past 8 in the morning, we piled into a little motorboat with two other couples and a local guide who introduced himself as Carlos. We set off across the bay, puttering along for about 15 minutes before Carlos stopped the boat and motioned for us all to heave ourselves over the side and into the water.
Carlos didn’t speak a lot of English, but he didn’t need any language skills for this kind of tour guiding. We just swam behind him as he flippered his way around the boat, diving down to point out the octopi, lobsters and sea urchins hiding in the clusters of coral below. At one point a stingray slid past us, its long tail swaying gently in the current.
I swam a little ways away from the group, lingering a bit and getting a closer look at the rounded mounds of brain coral and stately rows of Elkhorn coral that dotted the seafloor. The fish were as thick as they were full of color: multi-hued angelfish, neon-blue parrotfish, banana-yellow butterfly fish and dozens of other species.
But what really struck me was the quiet. As I floated around in that underwater world, the only sounds I could hear were the swish of the ocean in my ears and my own breath as it pushed its way to the surface.

McClanahan is a freelance journalist based in Oxford, England.

Guanacaste

 Guanacaste, nearby Hotel Riu


This photo of Hotel Riu Guanacaste is courtesy of TripAdvisor