Toyota Costa Rica Trip--Feb 28, Heading Out--Continued

When we finished our tour at Guayabo, we loaded up the bus and headed for The Hacienda Experience for lunch! Once we finished lunch, we learned about how sugar cane was transformed into sugar the “old way”. But first we got to taste fresh sugar cane! It was really neat! You don’t actually eat it, you just suck the sugar off the stock and then spit it out! And it truly tasted like sugar without any processing whatsoever.

And we actually got to see them create brown sugar blocks and they even made some candy (pure sugar—literally) for us! It was WAY too sweet for me! Anyway, the process to make sugar included feeding the cane into this wooden press that was turned by a team of cows to extract the juice from the cane into a container. The juice was then cooked over a constant temperature until it reached a certain consistency. The consistency has to be exactly right in order for it work correctly. So, as the sugar started to thicken, the guide would drop a bit of it into a bucket of cold water to see if it was ready. When it reach the correct consistency it was poured into a vat to cool down. When it had cooled sufficiently, then it was placed into molds. After it has cooled enough there, the blocks are removed and packaged for sale! The sugar was brown and was packaged in banana leaves, which was really neat!

We got to taste the concoction at a couple different stages of this process as well as they made a candy that the farmers used to make and give their children to keep them out of the way of the processing! Good plan, huh?

We then went on to EARTH university which is a really cool university devoted to the study of sustainable agriculture. All students who come here are studying agriculture. The university has a lot of different research projects going on. The students come from many different tropical countries and a good many of them do not pay ANY tuition. Top students from these countries are actually recruited by EARTH university. The goal is for them to learn sustainable agricultural techniques that they can use to improve their own home country upon their return. It is a beautiful campus with outstanding goals (too bad students from the U.S. can only do an semester or two visiting program!!