Costa Rica Part 3

Our family got up early to see the tide pools, but we weren't able to get out there at the lowest tide before we had to leave. And it started raining on us, but that didn't stop us from having fun climbing on the rocks and collecting seashells. We saw some crabs, but that's about it. 

 Pure Vida! Saturday we split up. Most of Shule and Loren's families went ziplining, and I would have loved to do that, but we decided to take a chocolate tour instead. We went back into Jaco and joined four other people to learn all about cocoa trees, the wildlife, and how cocoa beans turn into chocolate. We got to taste the cocoa beans right out of the pod. They looked like animal innards if I'm being really honest. They look disgusting, but tasted really good if you sucked on them. They tasted like mango and passionfruit. Then we got to taste them raw, dried, roasted, and finally ground with sugar which was the best tasting stage. The boys loved it and gorged themselves on chocolate. We saw lots of morphos butterflies flitting around too.

That afternoon we all met back at the house and a small group of us headed to the beach for some surfing lessons. This is what Zander had been waiting to do. It had been raining all that day, but suddenly there was a break in the clouds just in time for us to surf. Lucas didn't want to do this either, but he got a boogie board and played in the waves. Zander was a natural! He was so good, and was able to stand on his board about 75 percent of the time. The others had a harder time with it, but fun was had. Our instructor, Jorge, gave us some lounge chairs, and set up a table with ripe fruit and coconut water to drink. It was fabulous.