A journey between valleys at a great coffee origin

Pure Coffee taste

I fled to Costa Rica from Belgium, in November, the first week. Arriving in Costa Rica, I have felt immediately the warm local weather: the 11 hours flight had pushed me from 5 degrees rainy Brussels to 25 degrees sunny San Jose. 

At the airport, after making the customs procedures with kind police agents, mister Carlos Zuniga was waiting for me at the airport, for driving me to the hotel. In our way he prevent me of two major problems of Costa Rica nowadays: climate change and the presas.

That impression of warm and sunny weather I had in the beginning suddenly changed, as the sunset came bringing rain and a fresh night. Those rains in early November were not normal, and could affect the initial stages of the local coffee harvest.

Coffee Road at Acosta Region

Presa is the local name for traffic jams, which undermines the local competitiveness. My first travel was a quite eloquent example; I spent 4 hours from the airport to the hotel. The distance? 45 kilometers of well conserved, but crowded highway

Naranjo Region

In the next morning I woke up at 4 am, crossing San Jose city at the rush hour in the morning, demands not less than 3 hours by car. The traffic jams, 7 hours jetlag and Trump’s victory in the last night made this first day a little challenge for me.

After these initial cultural shock, I started to realize the context of local coffee production, which can be defined by a strong valorization of the product, high cost work force and a strict control by the governmental organ for coffee production the ICAFE.

 

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