Costa Rica! Pura Vida!

Hey Everyone!

Here is a peak at our AWESOME honeymoon to Costa Rica! Enjoy :)

The first place we stayed was on an organic coffee plantation where we went on a tour of the farm and had a coffee tasting.

Our tour guide Leo showed us how they use banana trees to irrigate the coffee plants and plant fruit trees amidst the coffee plants to draw bugs away from the coffee (organic pesticides. Bummer for the fruit trees...)

  

Unroasted Coffee Beans

 Roasted Coffee Beans

We learned how to discern bad coffee from good (in this case old from new).  A coffee tasting is called a "cupping". You try to detect different aromas and tastes, which part of your tongue the coffee stimulates most.  Mark is well on his way to being a coffee conosouir.

 Part of the cupping was to cleanse the palate by slurpping water noisily in between tastes of coffee and also slurpping the coffee from a spoon (you taste it better that way) Mark was a natural!

The next day we hiked to a volcano, El Poas, the second largest crater in the world. No one knew what the first was, it didn't seem to matter. The important thing was that theirs was the second!

 

Our balcony at Finca Rosa after an afternoon rain...

 It was the start of the rainy season while we were there which meant bright sunny mornings and cozy rainy afternoons!

On the way to our second hotel we stopped in a topiary garden!

 

El Silencio was our dream world! So much beauty! God is truly incredible to gift us with a world like this to enjoy! Imagine what heaven will be like!!!

                             

Everything we ate here was organic as well. They had their own organic vegetable garden and chickens for eggs (not to eat) we could pet them :)

We went hiking to three waterfalls and to a town nearby where the school that the hotel patronizes is located. We got to walk through an orchid garden and have a tortilla making lesson.

Most Amazing porch in the world!

Sad to say we were unable to get pictures of us zip-lining and white water rafting. Would have been a little tricky I guess.


We hope you enjoy these!
love,
the Luffs


P.S. "Pura Vida" seems to be the national saying there. It is used as a greeting, a response to "how are you?", a celebratory declaration. As best we can tell the essence of its meaning is "life is good!"