Thursday, March 12, 2020

Mushrooms and mountains

The highlight for today was a wonderful home cooked lunch on a shiitake mushroom and blackberry farm (yes really) at about 7500 feet elevation in the Talamanca Mountains. The shiitake farm is one of two that were initiated as part of a government program back in 2008.  The farmers were taught how to grow and harvest the mushrooms by experts from Bhutan.  The farm we visited produces 80 pounds of shiitakes a month.  They are sold at local farmers’s markets and to restaurants.  The farmer told us about the process. Did you know that shiitake mushrooms require oak logs for the fungus to grow? Or that a single log and set of spores can produce mushrooms four times a year for up to four years? 

The lunch we had was traditional Costa Rican fare: rice and beans with a variety of cooked fruits and vegetables. Dessert was small pastries filled with jams from the farm. The kitchen was pristine and the pots and pans were spotless.  The meal was cooked on a wood-fired cook-stove in the center of the kitchen.  

Lunch was of course preceded by the morning, which of course began with a bird watching walk before breakfast. Then we walked out about a half-mile into the Pacific (well not exactly) to the “whale’s tail” — a strip of rocky beach only accessible at low tide. We saw water birds and fiddler crabs, and watched small snails make beautiful patterns in the sand.  Afterwards, we drove on the Pan American Highway (which stretches from Alaska to the tip of Argentina) to its highest point (10931 ft) and then back down to our lunch spot (in a village named Siberia). After lunch, we drove deeper into the mountains, caught a glimpse of quetzal, and visited a hummingbird garden. It’s not just the colors of the hummingbirds that astonish... they come in vastly different sizes and the big ones are loud (!) when they fly past you. 




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