Our last paid excursion of our vacation, but not our last adventure!!!
We spent our last paid excursion learning about the Mayan culture and specifically Mayan chocolate . . . How can you go wrong with chocolate!!! We hooked up with our private tour guide in the morning and headed out to a very authentic Mayan family farm. They grow all their own cocoa trees and even the sugar cane used to sweeten the chocolate. The fun part, besides being surrounded by chocolate, we made our own chocolate from almost start to finish. I say almost because we didn't actually roast the cocoa beans. They were roasted for us and we started from there. When we arrived we started our morning with a cup of hot chocolate that was literally cocoa powder and hot water. We could drink it how it was, add spices and/or add sugar, which of course was fresh ground cane sugar from their farm, with a different taste than our regular table sugar at home. We were treated to a plate full of different flavored chocolates they make before the demonstration began. So all our teacher friends will appreciate this part . . . As the demonstration began, it was very "I do, We do, You do". We started with a plate of roasted cocoa beans that we had to shell. After shelling the beans and listening to some history, we widowed out the shells that were difficult to separate, similar to how a person might pan for gold. Once the beans were completely clean of shells, the beans and nibs (the broken beans) were put on a stone that was passed down for generations. We were taught the different stages of getting the beans from the solid state to the liquid state and then adding the sugar. We got to participate in each stage and by the time we were done, we worked up quite a sweat, plus the fact that we were in the jungle. When we were done, we had chocolate that was simply and deliciously just cocoa and cane sugar. There were no preservatives or fillers or anything extra. It was very good. While the demonstration was underway, in the open kitchen at the back of the open room, Juan's wife was making us lunch. We partook in a pretty traditional Mayan meal. We had chocolate chicken that was amazing. If you're thinking sweet like milk chocolate, not the case. We had rice and fried plantains, another root veggie similar to a potato although I can't remember the name, and a simple salad of cucumbers and tomatoes. While lunch was still cooking we did go downstairs to their factory. This is not like a factory you might imagine. This a simple family operation where they teach their customers the Mayan history and culture and they make about 100 or so chocolate bars a day, enough to sell and maintain their life and culture and share during the chocolate festival every year in May. It is a very simple life, but amazing people. The lunch was so wonderful and the tour was full of information and fun. If you ever make it to Belize, I would recommend it.
Hot chocolate!
Spices including cinnamon and chili . . .
Fresh ground cane sugar
Our plate of roasted cocoa beans before we shelled them.
Our plate of cocoa beans after we shelled them. When tasting them roasted just like this, they had a very roasted nut flavor, not unlike a good roasted filbert,
Our sample platter of chocolates to enjoy while we were shelling our cocoa beans. Didn't take us long to savor those lovely flavors.
Juan, the owner and farmer along with his grinding stones passed down from generation to generation. He is teaching us the first of five steps from solid to liquid state chocolate.
I started the first stage, just getting them crushed up to smaller nibs and trying to get to a somewhat powdery stage.
I did pretty good. Mark is doing the next stage getting into the beginning of the liquid stage melting the butter in the bean a little bit.
The end of stage two. The cocoa butter in the bean is starting to melt. Each stage gets faster and faster to create friction and heat to melt the natural cocoa butter and bring it to a liquid state.
This is the final state before we add sugar. For some reason I didn't take a picture of adding the sugar because it was an awesome fractions lesson for school. In fact, I'm going to try and use it somehow when we do fractions. I love life applications for math.
We put our chocolate into molds so we could share them with the other couple that was on the tour.
This is Juan, the farmer, on the right and Mark, our tour guide on the left. Mark has the best laugh! He is the same guide who took us snorkeling and cooked our lunch on the private island. Mark was great.
Traditionally they would roast the cocoa beans in the sun, but for they sake of a small little business, they roast the beans in a turkey roaster.
This contraption does the shelling for them now. They still widow out the shells by hand.
Now for the sake of production, they use this machine that gets them about 100 bars of chocolate at a time, instead of 1 from the stone. They still use the stone for their own personal use of cocoa beans and family meals.
And finally, our meal . . .
Chocolate chicken, rice, fried plantains, the root veggie, and the salad.
After our tour of the cocoa farm, we headed to some ruins. Although not the ruins you have seen in pictures, it was still fun. We saw some pretty big stelas (stone carvings) and their ball court was close to perfectly intact. The tombs were fascinating and we got to see a sun dial and learned some interesting facts about the Mayan history. This particular ruin they believe belonged to a specific royal family and was not a major city. It is named Nim Li Punit.
Mark in front of one of the huge stelas.
This is one of the meeting areas.
The ball court. They don't know exactly what the game looked like but they figured out it was definitely some sort of game with some sort of ball.
This is the sun dial. It was much, much taller in its original form.
Their tombs. The bodies are not mummified. They are entombed and the graves are layered up.
My favorite guy for the last 25 years!!!
As we finished our trip of Maya, Present to Past, we headed back to our little cabana. There is no daylight savings here so our day starts fairly early and it is dark, dark by 6:30. Even though we have had a few nights here and there "out on the town" so to speak, this particular day along with many others, as the day light disappeared we retreated back to our cabana and this day, we fell asleep around 7:15 and I did not wake the next day until around 7. I was so tired.
Until next time, we love all!
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