Turrialba...day 3

So of course I lug my computer here and it won´t work...so I will have to use my jump drive to get pictures from it and such.
I wrote a really good post yesterday, and saved it to Word, so that will come soon, but for now, I guess it´s day 3 of our Adventure.
I won´t write about the other days, but today was wildly amusing.
We woke up around 6 to some great merengue music coming from our neighbor´s house. So why not wake up with the locals!? We walked down to Mussmani to get bread and orange juice, and then decided on a coffee toure, which, in my years of traveling down here, I have never done...and I LOVE coffee!!
We decided on the "Golden Bean Coffee Tour," and set up a tour time of 10:30, and she told us how to get to the bus station and what town the tour was in.
Of course, I stepped up to the plate and told the bus driver where we wanted to go, and paid the 250 colones (40 cents) and off we went. Mary and Danielle were with me, and at a hotel, the man said (in Spanish), "Here is Altirro," which was our stop...so we thought. The hotel was a super beautiful resort listed in the guide book, so we walked the half mile up the drive to it. When we inquired at the desk where the Coffee Plantation Tours were, the lady told us to walk back down the drive way, and go almost 2 miles along the dirt road until you got to some bamboo...take a left and walk up the hill to the Plantation...um...fabulous. At this point, it was 10:30, so we walked around the grounds of the Casa Turire (www.hotelcasaturire.com), which had beautiful views and gardens, and a working farm where a lot of the hotel´s veggies and such came from. There was a water buffalo, which Danielle pet.
Then we started our walk...hike...
After about 15 minutes of walking, Mary, who was up front, screamed, and we looked down to see a Coral Snake...luckily it was headless and no longer moving. We took pictures. After that we were much more aware of where we were stepping. We finally made it to the Golden Bean (www.goldenbean.net). The tour was almost over, but the guide was really nice and understanding, and he told us that we could do the last part first and then he would take us on a private tour!! His name was Jerome. We got to sample coffee first, which was nice, since we had skipped it earlier.
The first step was harvesting the beans. They plant banana plants nearby because they act as an aquaduct during the dry season, watering the plants when they don´t get much rain. They use the banana leaves for shade and to build little mini greenhouses for the seedlings. Then the beans are put into the Depulpers (coffee beans have four skins) and the sorters...and they are sorted into three tiers of quality. Then they go into a Fermenting vat, followed by a wash and a dry in several different driers...all feuled by the wood from the old coffee plants. The skins from the depulping is used to feed livestock and make compost which goes in the fields to grow the plants...nothing goes to waste!! Pretty cool. They had several methods of drying the beans, from machines to leaving them in the sun. The beans are roasted with varying temperatures for different roasts, and bagged by these sweet ladies in the mill. Each batch is tested for several factors...boldness, flavor, color, and so on, and we got to ¨slurp¨some coffee to taste the differences in the three levels of quality. It was great coffee...then we ended back in the cafe and gift shop, where the three of us combined to buy three bags of coffee (every bag you get takes money off, so we saved a few bucks that way). We finished around 2:30, and walked probably 500 meters to the normal bus stop, and the bus ride back was much less eventful. We made it back to town by 3, and now I think I need a nap before I do anything else.
It was an adventure, but it was well worth it!
Now if I could only get my computer working, it would be fabulous!