Chocolate making!!

We took the bus from Punta Gorda to San Felipe in the morning – it wasn’t far and the bus dropped us right outside the chocolate factory.

The place (Ixcacao) is said to be the only place where Mayans continue to make chocolate in its original form from Cacao. They have a large farm (60 acres) where they harvest various crops and they take the cacao beans and grind them to make all sorts of chocolate products (from bars of chocolate to chocolate body lotion).

San Felipe is very much a rural town and the houses are spread out across the town. Most people living there seem to be self sufficient – and when walking around the town we could only see a couple of shops in the whole town.

The place we were going to be staying in was very basic – the building was literally made of wood within a wooded area! There were proper toilets and a plug socket in each room too.

The girl I was travelling with had contacted them to tell them our plans and they were meant to have organised a tour for us when we arrived. However, they were busy with another larger group and were unable to be with us until 3pm! That meant that it was too late to be able to go to see the farm.

However, the man in charge showed us the process of making chocolate from Cacao beans and we were made to do it too – we made our own chocolate which we were able to eat after.

It was very interesting to see how they did it – but I was quite surprised to see that they seemed to just not use technology which would make life so much easier for them. They did so much by hand which undoubtedly meant that they could not produce vast amounts of chocolate in the same way they would be able to if they used the technology available to them. His argument was that they didn’t need to – and they didn’t even sell their chocolate anywhere apart from in the shop that we were in! People from various parts of the country travelled to this shop to buy the chocolate as they didn’t offer any delivery service.

As they did not take us to the farm, we were not charged for the tour.

We were provided dinner there - which was really really good food! We went to sleep at about 10pm.