Northern Nica with Nikki

As sad as we were to see Roque and Aimee go back to California, we had Nikki with us for an additional week of travel and we were ready to cool down. First, Nikki and I took a short trip to the top of Mombacho, the volcano right outside of Granada to see its cloud forest. Mombacho rises 1400 meters above sea level and is MUCH cooler than Granada thanks to both its height and extensive vegetation. 

 Nikki leading the way on our Mombacho hike

Usually the top of Mombacho is covered in clouds, but we got lucky on our hike since it was clear and got to see amazing views of Lake Nicaragua and Granada. 

 Looking out over Granada and the lake. One the right side on the photo, around the peninsula, are 365 of small islands known as the Isletas that were created when Mombacho exploded many years ago. 

Getting a taste of cooler weather on top of Mombacho got me excited for more - time to head to the highlands. We headed to Matagalpa, The Pearl of the North, a city in the mountainous north of the country that averages ten degrees cooler than Granada (still 80%+ humidity). Matagalpa is the second most important city economically in Nicaragua since it is in the center of coffee production - one of Nicaragua's most famous exports. Our timing for the trip was also auspicious - the coffee harvest begins in November, so we would get to see coffee harvesting and production in process!

Matagalpa is a part of Nicaragua with a lot of European influence, especially German. In the 1800s, gold was discovered around Matagalpa, attracting immigrants. Some Germans who settled in Matagalpa acquired coffee beans from Carazo (I wrote about coffee in Carazo in this previous post) and planted them. Coffee did really well and quickly production in and around Matagalpa overtook the coffee production in the hotter and lower elevations of Carazo. The success of coffee attracted even more immigrants, and a lot of the German immigrants who moved to Matagalpa ended up marrying local women and have descendants living in Matagalpa to this day.

Our home-base for the trip was Selva Negra - an eco-lodge twenty minutes outside of Matagalpa up a mountain owned by a German-Nicaraguan coffee family. Selva Negra (named after the Black Forest in Germany) is a 100 plus year old coffee plantation which has been by a fourth and fifth generation Nicaraguan-German couple for the past 40 years. Selva Negra is in a beautiful location with a lot of potential to be a great hotel/tour operator/restaurant...potential not yet fully realized. While at Selva Negra, we did some hiking, took tours of the coffee plantation, and enjoyed sitting outdoors with light sweaters on.

Heading out for an early morning nature tour

 Humongous ficus tree 

The highlight of the trip to Matagalpa for me was visiting a few women's cooperatives - both the journey and destinations were great. One afternoon we headed out to find a weaving cooperative and a jewelry cooperative. The weaving cooperative, Telares Indigenas, El Chile, in a small community thirty minutes outside of Matagalpa is well-known in Nicaragua, so we popped the name of the community into GPS and headed off to find the group. Unfortunately, as is often the case when I am in charge of directions, we missed our exit to El Chile off of the highway and while looking for a place on the road to safely turn around, GPS found a new route for us to take. We got onto a gravel road with our low Toyota Yaris and hoped for the best. The road started off pretty smooth as we passed children and families in houses staring at us as we drove by. After five minutes, we got to a huge hill and as we skidded down, we realized that there was no way we would be able to return the way we had come.

We continued on the road, passing over a riverbed and by cows, until we got to another hill that we could not climb. Not bueno. Since we couldn't go forward, we decided to turn back and try our luck on the hill we had skidded down since we could not see any other way out. As expected, we could not climb up the hill we skidded down, we were stuck. Our rental car had service for calling a tow truck, but since we had no idea where we were, getting service would take a while, so I decided to try my luck with the locals. The house next to where our car was stuck told us that another house had a truck, so I hiked up to ask for help towing us out. I went up to the house where two women were shucking corn and asked if anyone could help us with a truck and apologized for the inconvenience. The women went back to speak to someone, and the entire family came out to see the stranded gringos (at least three men, five children, and three or four additional women). One man, Abner, told us there was another road that we could take to get out and joined us in the car, directing us to a road that GPS had not highlighted as a way out. Abner sat in the car with us and explained that we had gotten lost and taken the wrong exit (we realized this when we saw the cows) but that we should not worry since we were not the first people this had happened to and that he would explain the right way to go. As we drove out on a new road to the highway, he told us a little bit about his family and within five minutes we were back on the highway. Before dropping him off, Abner pointed out a few landmarks to make sure we found our way to El Chile and declined our offer to reimburse him for his help. Getting lost and having Abner help us get back on track was both the most stressful and most wonderful part of the day, reminding me of the hospitality I used to get from women's groups I worked with as a Peace Corps volunteer.

After our unexpected detour, and with Abner's clear instructions, we made it to El Chile and met the group of women weaving there. The women weavers of El Chile are well known in Nicaragua and have been highlighted in a few different national news pieces. The story of the cooperative in sum is that the women in this community used to weave, but that tradition was stopped by Somoza during the 1940s as part of his effort to modernize Nicaragua. In 1984, an Argentinian woman inspired by the revolution came to Nicaragua and ended up in El Chile, where she taught women how to weave incorporating new techniques to make their work more economically viable. With the support of Ernesto Cardenal, the culture minister, the women's cooperative was formed, women were trained, and they began to produce and sell weavings. While their weaving is not purely traditional, traditional weaving takes months to produce and would need to have a very high sales cost to cover production, the tradition of weaving is something that has been re-established in this community and cooperative members are able to earn a good income through their sales.

 Aaron and Nikki with some members of the cooperative and their rugs

 Outside the cooperative with our purchases!

After finding El Chile, getting to the women's cooperative making seed jewelry was much easier. This women's cooperative, Artesanias Mujeres del Plomo, is much smaller with four members and started out with a few women trying to find a way to make income in a community that does not have much by way of jobs. After testing out jam-making, the women switched to jewelry made out of seeds and make really beautiful earrings, necklaces, and bracelets that are also sold around the country. While there are only four women in the cooperative, they have children in the community who find seeds and provide them with school supplies, and they have teens in the community that are learning how to make jewelry as well. With money from sales, the cooperative has purchased a house to showcase their jewelry and built up a patio for jewelry-making classes.

 Nikki with the leader of the El Plomo cooperative

Outside of visiting cooperatives, the majority of our time in Matagalpa was spent in nature. We went on a coffee tour one morning while harvest was in full swing and got to observe the wet-milling process, and we went on a tour of a cacao plantation and processing facility. 

 In the coffee field at Selva Negra

 The end of the coffee wet-milling process at Selva Negra (waste water with coffee bean shells is washed out, leaving quality coffee to then be taken to dry)

 Victor, President of a cacao cooperative, sharing some heirloom cacao from his plantation

 With a cacao tree full of not-quite-ripe pods, eating a pod from another tree

 Victor with Jackson, the plantation caretaker's son, in his plantation

 Elias, Jackson's little brother, enjoying cacao

We finished our trip to Matagalpa off with a trip to a beautiful waterfall called Cascada Blanca (White Waterfall).

 Sign on a tree next to Cascada Blanca says that swimming is not allowed due to its depth and mystery. According to our guide, the sign is to discourage people from entering the water more than anything during the coffee season, when water from wet-milling is dumped back into rivers, polluting them and making the water unsafe for swimming.

Cooling off at Cascada Blanca

Traveling to Matagalpa with Nikki was literally and figuratively cool. We are now waiting for our next batch of guests to come to explore some hotter parts of the country later this month - Leon and the Corn Islands coming soon!

Primera Visita!

Over the past two weeks, Aaron and I have hosted our first guests to Nicaragua – Roque, Aimee, and Nikki (his daughter, her mother and my comadre, and Aaron’s mom)! For one week, all five of us traveled to the island of Ometepe, Playa El Coco on the Pacific Coast, and Granada. The trip was amazing and wonderful and really helped highlight what a beautiful country Nicaragua is (not that I cannot see it, but when we are sitting at home sweating and trying to kill mosquitoes that somehow make it into our mosquito net, I lose perspective).

Aimee and Roque arrived a day before Nikki, and when we told them that a volcano in between Managua and Granada where you could see the lava, they told us that they had to see it. So when Nikki arrived, we picked her up at the airport and told her we were having lava for dinner. 

The Masaya volcano has a bunch of craters and around 7 months ago, one of them erupted, leaving lava visible. A reddish sulfer haze can be seen above the Masaya Volcano at all times, and at night cars wait in line to go to the top of the crater and look down at the lava. We joined the line of waiting cars to have our brush with lava. Safety measures in Nicaragua are more lax than I expect they would be in the USA - after an hour of waiting we drove up to the top of the crater and were asked to back into our parking space (for a speedier exit in case of a new explosion?) and then were allowed to walk to the edge of the crater to peer down into the crater with a waist-high stone ridge as our only protection. The view from the top was like THIS - both really cool (we were a bit higher than the video vantage point) and scary. After fifteen minutes of staring into the center of the earth, we went back to Granada for one night's rest before continuing our volcano tour. 

The next day, we headed out to Ometepe island in the middle of Lake Nicaragua to spend three days at on a secluded farm on Maderas Volcano (Ometepe is the largest island in Lake Nicaragua and has two volcanoes connected by an estuary, making it look from above like an infinity symbol. Volcan Concepcion is the larger of the two volcanoes, is sometimes active, and is on the more populated side of the island. Volcan Maderas is inactive and less touristy since it is harder to get to and most people do not travel with cars to the island - we did).

Aimee and Roque ready to get on the boat to Ometepe (sadly, we did not get to ride Ferry El Che Guevara)

 Roque steering the ship to Ometepe (you can see Concepcion Volcano in the background, Maderas Volcano is behind Roque)

After an hourlong boat ride, we arrived on Ometepe and drove forty-five minutes around the island, arriving at Finca Mystica around sunset. Finca Mystica is a beautiful eco-lodge with cob cabins built by Americans Ryan and Angela, who bought the property ten years ago. For some reason, Finca Mystica is not in Lonely Planet, but it is the #1 rated specialty lodging on the island and if anyone is thinking about where to stay on the island - this is the place to go. When we arrived at F.M., it was to the sounds of howler monkeys, who live in the trees around Finca Mystica and who were having a loud argument with the dogs who were barking up at them. 

 Sunset at Finca Mystica

Roque at the end of a path

Ryan recommended a lot of activities for our time on the island, and we opted for one activity a day followed by hanging out at the beautiful F.M. On our first full day, we did a kayaking trip into an estuary in between the two sides of the island and we saw caymans, turtles, and a lot of birds. It was beautiful and Roque helped Aimee and I kayak through the estuary and then back through the lake. 

The next day, we decided to do a recommended hike up to a nearby waterfall. Ryan told us that the hike from Finca Mystica to the waterfall was 3-5 hours round trip, a slight underestimation of how long it would take us. With a 4x4, we were able to drive halfway up a half washed out dirt road to the waterfall, cutting the journey by at least half. Once we started walking, we realized that without the 4x4 we would not have been able to make it to the waterfall - the trail was extremely steep and challenging. Nikki and Roque were the oldest (72) and youngest (5 and 1/2) people on the trail by at least 15 years on each end, so our abbreviated trip ended up taking close to four hours! Going at a slower pace, we got to see a lot of beautiful butterflies, some gorgeous trees, and found quality walking sticks for Ro and Nikki.

 Taking a break on the trail up to the waterfall

We made it! Time to cool off under the waterfall

When we got back to the lodge after our big hike, half catatonic, Ryan was worried about reports of Hurricane Otto - a late-season hurricane headed to Nicaragua with projections of more rain in two days than in an average rainy season! As the country prepared for the worst, we wondered if we should continue on to Playa El Coco on the Pacific Coast. Since we already had plans to go, Aimee loves the ocean, and were not sure what was going on with the Hurricane, we decided to stick to our plan.

Playa El Coco is where Aaron and I went in August and saw baby turtles released into the ocean and we planned to take our guests to the same beach in the hopes of seeing some of the last turtles of the season. When we got to Playa El Coco, it was practically deserted, unlike the last time we had been there. Aimee could not wait to get in the water and plunged in within minutes of getting on the beach. Aaron and I had heard of stingrays sometimes being in the water when the water is especially warm (known as aguas malas, literal translation - bad waters), so we warned her to shuffle her feet to avoid getting stung, and off she went into the waves.

 Roque an Aaron making sand art

After a short time in the water, Aimee came out...unexpected from our human fish. Unfortunately, Aimee had entered aguas malas and was stung by a stingray while shuffling along in the sand. When I told some people at the local store, they said it could be due to the hurricane that the ocean waters had been all mixed up and turned bad. Luckily for us, Dr. Sachs had access to internet and found an effective cure - submerging the sting in piping hot water for 60-90 minutes neutralizes stingray venom - we had Aimee's foot in scalding water for 90 minutes and her sting stopped hurting and bleeding.

Roque running to Aimee

Helping mom walk ashore

We had planned on staying on the beach for two days, but everyone's desire to get into the water was dampened by the sting ray (pun intended), so we headed back to Granada the next morning. As unlucky as Aimee's sting was, the change in plans that it precipitated were very auspicious - within a few hours of our leaving, an earthquake off the coast of El Salvador led to a tsunami warning and the whole coastal area we had been in was evacuated (there was no tsunami, so ultimately everyone was OK, thankfully).

Back in Granada, we waited for the hurricane to land, but it ended up losing a lot of steam upon hitting land and Aimee and Roque had a beautiful last few days in Nicaragua. Our time in Granada was spent on play dates with Silvana (Aaron's friend Jefferson's daughter), and walked around town taking in the sites, taking a chocolate tour, and swimming in our backyard pool.

 Family portrait at the cultural center

 Roque with all her parents at the Cultural Center

The Choco Museo Bean to Bar tour was surprisingly really fun - we learned about the history of cacao, got to roast some, and made a few different chocolate beverages from throughout history before each getting to make our own bar. 

 Learning a little bit about cacao history

 Doing the special song and dance to help roast the cacao seeds - "Bate, Bate, Chocolate!"

 Tasting one of our chocolate drinks (made with the cacao that we roasted and mashed ourselves!) - Mayan-style, Aztec-style, or European-style.

 Roque mixing one of our drinks with the molinillo

Getting ready to make her chocolate bar

Roque riding Aimee around the pool

Saying goodbye to Aimee and Roque was really hard, but more traveling was yet to come! Nikki stayed on another week for a trip up north to the cloud forest near Matagalpa, coming up next.

Our beautiful first guests drinking tiste at the Masaya crafts market

Costa Rican Vanilla

After a week in Mexico, the birthplace of vanilla, Aaron and I headed down to Costa Rica for another week of learning about vanilla and finding potential ties and partnerships. Starting in the 1980s, Costa Rica has been growing vanilla in small quantities with farmers in touristy areas of the country (who end up selling vanilla locally, not in large quantities on international markets). We hooked up with Professor Amelia Paniagua at the National University near the capital of Costa Rica to learn more about the work being done there to promote vanilla.

Looking at some native vanilla vines with Amelia and Gaby

Vanilla is endemic to Mexico and Central America, and in the 1980s some government programs in Costa Rica helped establish vanilla plantations in the south with agricultural extension agent support. Researchers began looking in the forests and documented new varieties of vanilla, a new supply chain was being born. In the 1990s, with a new government, support for vanilla production evaporated, and producers were left on their own when the agricultural extension agents were taken away. For ten years or so, small-scale vanilla production was negligible.

In the 2000s, Amelia, a forestry scientist, and some other researchers received funding to start a vanilla project, and momentum behind vanilla production in Costa Rica was born anew. New people in different regions of the country were trained on how to grow vanilla, a new association to support vanilla production was formed with researchers, producers, and scientists making up the membership, and the goal of setting up a processing plant to get Costa Rican vanilla into the international market was born.

Costa Rica has had a lot of challenges with vanilla - one of the biggest being that the type of vanilla that grows best in Costa Rica is a hybrid of two different types of vanilla, and this hybrid is legally not recognized as vanilla in the USA. What does that mean? According to an administrative law set by the FDA, there are only two types of vanilla that legally count - vanilla planifolia (dominant in world market, from Mexico, Madagascar, etc.) and vanilla tahitenses (from Tahiti). Any other types of vanilla (like pompona or the Costa Rican hybrid) cannot be sold in bulk quantities in the USA (small sales to tourists who take it back are fine, but selling to Coca Cola, not so much). Unfortunately for Costa Rica, vanilla planifolia is essentially extinct, all Costa Rican vanilla is a hybrid that grows exceptionally well. 

Another challenge in Costa Rica is volume. There are maybe thirty or forty producers of vanilla in all of Costa Rica and many of them have only a couple hundred plants (unlike the thousands of plants in Mexican small-farms), so getting volume to a level where a national processing plant could do good business will also be a challenge. 

Speaking to Amelia and some other leaders in the vanilla association showed us some of the issues that come with attempting to start a new supply chain, and made us think about how important financing and scale will be for a supply chain to make economic sense in Nicaragua. Meanwhile, we also wanted to actually see what this hybrid vanilla looked like, it was time for a farm visit.

One day we took Gaby with us to visit the largest vanilla producer in Costa Rica, Cinco Ramas. Cinco Ramas is a huge organic farm with vanilla, pepper, chile, and turmeric grown under 9 Hectares of greenhouse canopy. The American owners of Cinco Ramas bought the property with the greenhouse already fabricated from the Dutch government after they shut down a development project in the region. The farm came with tons of vanilla vines, and the couple set to work making it productive, diversifying with other crops over the years.

Greenhouse cover for turmeric and tabasco chiles

Our guide and owner of the farm, Geri, was very open about the challenges growing vanilla - good years interspersed with bad due to climate change, steep learning curve for growing vanilla, and high costs for production - and we got to see what a hybrid vanilla plant looked like. 

Hybrid Costa Rican Vanilla - thicker vine and bigger leaves than vanilla planifolia

Hybrid vanilla fruit - much larger than fruit on vanilla planifolia some grow to be over to 22 cm. long

Thoroughly sweaty with Geri post-tour

At the end of the trip, we learned about a distinct vanilla experience in Costa Rica, and while the news was not as encouraging as what we learned in Mexico, meeting people involved in vanilla in Costa Rica was very valuable and will hopefully lead to some partnerships in the future. Now it is back to the drawing board to figure out what's next with Doselva!

With Gaby on a hike in a much cooler part of Costa Rica

Mexican Vanilla

It has been a while since I last wrote a blog post, sorry! In the past two weeks, Aaron, Jefferson, and I have done a lot of travel - not only for Aaron and I to renew our visas (every three months), but also to learn more about vanilla and the feasibility  of our getting a new value chain started in Nicaragua. Our first trip was to Veracruz, Mexico - the cradle of vanilla. This blog recounts our visit in a lot of detail, so feel free to skim and look at photos. I realize that I also may not have ever explained what the vanilla process is like, so some things might not make a ton of sense. Here is a little summary about vanilla, and here is a little something about Mexican vanilla.

We flew to Mexico the week before Day of the Dead, and along with our Costa Rican friend Gaby, drove out to northern Veracruz to learn about the history, production, and processing of vanilla in Mexico with our guide, Juan Hernandez Hernandez. Juan is an agricultural extension agent for a government ministry similar to the USDA or US Department of the Interior who Jefferson met a few years back at a vanilla conference. While Juan originally researched jalapeño chiles, 19 years ago he was asked to take over vanilla research when a colleague went to university and has never looked back. He has literally written the handbook on vanilla and has helped people start vanilla plantations both in Mexico and in other countries. Our first day with Juan, we sat in a dark room all day and learned everything there is to know about vanilla....maybe not everything, but ten-hours worth. If you are interested, I found a little video that summarizes some of what we learned.  On our second day, Juan took our show on the road and we went out to meet people and their plants.

Our first stop was to see vanilla grown in a greenhouse, a method that we do not plan on using in Nicaragua since it does not support agroforestry systems. The men who showed us around their greenhouse were following their father into the family business, with a twist. Their father started growing vanilla on citrus trees fifty years back, and they built a greenhouse five years ago for more intense production. 

Gaby, greenhouse grower, and Jefferson in the greenhouse (all the leaves on the ground are mulch covering vanilla vines' roots)

The greenhouse was about a quarter of an acre with intense vine production. One thing that we noticed was that a lot of the vines did not have that many fruit on them (harvest is in December, so this time of year we should be seeing a lot of large fruit on the vines). We learned that a lot of the vanilla harvest was lost due to 'fruit abortion', which is when the fruit drops from the vine suddenly soon after pollination. This issue that has been affecting the region for the past few years due to climate change and it has happened a lot more in greenhouses, probably due to the higher temperatures in there (up to 90% of fruit aborted). The men we met shared their plans to build another greenhouse, and that currently they make a lot of their money off of selling cuttings of vanilla to other farmers and foreigners who want to start growing vanilla rather than the green vanilla itself.

 Having a Coke with the greenhouse vanilla growers, Gaby, and Juan (second from right) 

Our next stop was in a citrus grove, where vanilla is being grown on tutors (or smaller trees) under cover of citrus trees. This farm was run by an older gentleman, Don Pedro, who had started growing vanilla three or four years ago. His farm looked a lot closer to what we envision vanilla plantations will look like in Nicaragua - the farm has lower temperatures thanks to two levels of shade cover (vanilla requires 50% shade, so two levels of shade are recommended). His vines had also been affected by fruit abortion, but they had a lot more fruit than we had seen in the greenhouse probably due to lower temperatures on his farm.

Don Pedro and a vine with a lot of fruit

Don Pedro showing us how he guides vanilla vines back up the tutor with a piece of wood once they have grown long.

Don Pedro told us that anyone who wants to grow vanilla has to be ready to work since it requires a lot of care. Seeing his plants doing really well, and knowing that he is a newcomer to the crop, made us feel good about the possibility of getting new farmers started on vanilla in Nicaragua. 

After visiting the two farms, we went to one of the biggest vanilla processors in Mexico - Gaya (PR video, but you can get the vibe). Gaya was started by Italian immigrants in the 1800s (its current CEO is the fifth generation to lead this company) and is one of the five big processors of vanilla in Mexico. Gaya has two HUMONGOUS greenhouses with thousands of vines, some grown from in vitro processing at labs, all of which are organically certified. Gaya additionally buys green vanilla from a few hundred farmers, who grow conventionally mostly with other crops like citrus.

Organic vanilla grown in a MASSIVE greenhouse at Gaya

Gaya's processing facilities were huge and we learned a lot about the curing process, known as el beneficiado or beneficio in Spanish. The beneficiado is a months long process that requires a lot of investment in materials and space. Fruit that are harvested have to be killed (traditionally in Mexico in ovens, in Madagascar by dipping in hot water), and then put in the sun and sweated in wooden boxes for months to get properly cured (vanilla needs to reach a certain vanillin content and humidity level). There is a science to the process, along with intuition and know-how from experience, and it takes time and money to convert the green pods into tasty vanilla - hence the price tag when you buy real vanilla. 

After visiting Gaya, we spent the night in Papantla, home of vanilla, and enjoyed the public art dedicated to vanilla, the famous voladores of Papantla, and saw some day of the dead celebrations. 

The legend of vanilla

Watch the video, it's worth it

Day of the Dead celebration

On our third and final day touring vanilla in Mexico, we went to a smaller vanilla processing plant, where we got a more realistic perspective on what the vanilla processing industry is like (we spoke to the manager and head scientist, not a tour guide). Mexico's vanilla industry is well established, dominated by a few large players who can set prices, and has tons of small farmers who sell their green vanilla as soon as they can legally do so. In Mexico, there is a law that sets the date when vanilla can be picked to limit theft and harm to vanilla quality, and farmers have to invest in security and are threatened with robbery and even death during the harvest - this business is no joke.  We also visited a farm where a former vanilla farmer has let his land convert back to forest and is growing vanilla the traditional way the Totonacas did in ancient times. 

This farmer, Jose Luis, was possibly the happiest man I have ever met, and he shared his story with us while showing us his farm. After farming citrus for years, Jose Luis began growing vanilla as well until one day he decided he just didn't want to do it anymore. He cut down all of his citrus trees and vanilla vines and let them go wild. He discovered after a few years of neglect that vanilla in its natural state is like a weed, it grows everywhere, and unlike the vanilla grown on farms or in greenhouses, which require hand pollination, his vines get pollinated by insects - something that has been considered no longer possible. 

Jose Luis showing us his wild vanilla

Two bugs that pollinate vanilla - the smaller one pollinates vanilla planifolia (the type we consume), the larger one pollinates vanilla pompona (the type used for perfumes)

Along with allowing his vanilla vines to grow wild and get pollinated naturally, Jose Luis leaves the vanilla fruit on the vines for almost an entire year so that they self-cure, rather than cutting them down and processing them after eight or nine months of growth. He told us that his job is to be a gatherer, so he waits until the pods are self-cured and then harvests. While he gets way less vanilla than he used to when he farmed it, the vanilla pods that he gets from this plants are much larger and they get such a high concentration of vanillin from this natural process that crystals actually form on the vanilla pod. He's got quality and a traditional way of production, but no quantity to speak of.

A vanilla pod that was self-cured - Jose Luis does not need to 'kill' his vanilla pods or do any of the processing we observed at Gaya, he only lets them sit in the sun for a few days after harvesting and they are all set.

Jose Luis continues to let vanilla grow wild on his farm and hopes to get to a point where there is enough wild-produced vanilla to sell, in the meantime he depends on tourism. While his production method is not viable as a business in Nicaragua, it was really impressive to see what traditional vanilla growing looked like and how different its environment and processing is from the industry we saw in the previous days.

Gaby, Jose Luis, Aaron, me, and Juan with vanilla pompona all around us

Before heading back to Nicaragua, we made a final pit stop at an archaeological site - El Tajín. We did not get a tour guide, I have no idea what any of the buildings were originally used for or how they were rediscovered, but the site was beautiful and impressive - like Mexico. 

Aaron with pyramid

With Aaron, Jefferson, and a bunch of pyramids

Next to a carving on a ball court