Date: 17.01.2022
Author: Benjamin
Position: Costa Rica 
Geographical position: Don Eli Coffeefarm
Etmal: 7078 nm
Ship: Pelican of London 

Yesterday it was a more relaxing day for us due to our late arrival at Carlos coffee farm after the long bus drive.

Camping

Our first challenge was to find a proper spot for the tents. The camping area is right next to a small river so it was hard to find even flat grounds. While building up the tents we already encountered our first of which turned out to become a bunch more visitors: fireflys. From the current status, I’ve already seen large spiders, caterpillars, cockroaches and others trying to invade our tent. After successfully surviving our first night camping, which might have been a little bit challenging for some of us, we woke up freezing. Here on the coffee farm, which is 1600m over the water level, the temperatures are way lower than we got used to in Jaco Beach. As I’ve already mentioned there is a river right besides our tents, in which we are allowed to bath and as Carlos said, it is very clean. Therefore, we could wash our cloths in it as well. 

Picking

During breakfast we could already try the coffee that we would pick ourselves as well later this day while having pancakes with maple sirup. So later, we went picking on the coffee fields. As you can see on the picture, there are red, black and green ones. While picking you have to focus on only taking the black and red ones because the others aren’t ripe yet. A simple but exhausting task, especially because of the burning midday sun. I think, we all are very thankful for the packing lists from before the voyage, so we are all well prepared for the activities here.

Farm tour

After lunch, when we had moved our tents closer together so the guys from the Regina Maris, who arrived later, also had space for their tents, we had a farm tour with Carlos. With his truck he drove us through the farm in small groups each, where we also made a quick stop at the picking stations from Carlos employees. These „Pickers“ are actually living in the forest (Panama or Nicaragua) and getting their jobs provided by Carlos. Compared to the workers on other farms he pays and treats them very fairly.

In the evening the Regina Maris arrived and we helped them setting up their tents. Due to the random previous stops together, most of us already get along with each others very well.