A couple quick updates, without really saying anything new...

What you see below is a test of a website I'm using called Bones in Motion. It allows me to use my cell phone to track my rides: speed, distance, and elevation. Then it spits out all the cool info you see below. That was basically a test of how the posting from that site to this blog worked. Click on my BIM Active link to the right for a few more rides I've done, and stay tuned for some rides from upcoming trips.
BIM Active

Also, I have a new photo website. I've got all my photos from Costa Rica, Vermont, and the first trip out here in California posted. I'll keep posting as I keep shooting. And yes, I'll post those more often than I've posted photos before because it is WAY easier to upload than other sites I've used in the past.
Jon Vick's SmugMug

This is a ride I did in Oregon with Karl from Trek Demo. The words most often heard from my mouth, "we don't have hills in Minnesota." Activity Route: -- Elev. Avg: 923 ft Location: Corvallis, OR Elev. Gain: -33 ft Date: 04/27/07 Up/Downhill: [+1561/-1594] Time: 12:14 PM Difficulty: 3.8 / 5.0   Weather: Fair   72F temp; 49% humidity   72F heat index; winds SE 3 Performance Distance: 7.18 miles Time: 1:11:37 Speed: 6 mph Pace: 10' 00 /mi Calories: 0 Map   Elevation (ft.)   Speed (mph)   Splits Mile Pace (min/mile) Speed (mph) Elevation Gain actual +/- avg actual +/- avg 1 9' 09 -0' 51 6.5 +0.5 +43 ft 2 11' 07 +1' 07 5.4 -0.6 +262 ft 3 11' 19 +1' 19 5.3 -0.7 +288 ft 4 19' 17 +9' 17 3.1 -2.9 +351 ft 5 4' 11 -5' 49 14.3 +8.3 -174 ft 6 5' 30 -4' 30 10.9 +4.9 -522 ft 7 7' 53 -2' 07 7.6 +1.6 -263 ft end 17' 08 +7' 08 3.5 -2.5 -20 ft Versus average of 6.0 mph

Posted from bimactive.com

It's not Costa Rica without coffee...

Another new feature to this year’s Trek Travel Costa Rica trip was a coffee tour. Being the coffee connoisseur (read: addict) that I am, I thought it was a little crazy that we visited a country as famous for it’s coffee as Costa Rica is without so much as a mention of coffee. That would be like visiting Bordeaux or Napa Valley without even mentioning wine.

Monica knew of a coffee company that was located very near the start of our last ride. We stopped in during our FTP to see if it was feasible to do a tour, have a picnic, and start our ride from there. They were willing to do a tour for us so we signed it up. The day we visited they didn’t have time for a tour, so we went into the first trip with little to no idea what to expect of the tour. It turned out to be really sweet! They are working very hard to be as environmentally friendly and organic as possible. Café Diria is a coffee co-op made up of many very small, family run coffee farms. The farmers bring in their beans for processing at the Diria plant.

If your coffee started it's life like this, it's Robusta.

There are two primary types of coffee: Arabica and Robusta. Arabica is the only type of coffee grown in Costa Rica. It is actually illegal to grow Robusta in Costa Rica. There are several drawbacks to Robusta. First, it drains the soil of nutrients. While it produces much larger quantities of coffee per plant, it is a lot harder to sustain the soil where it is grown. The trees are also much larger, making hand picking impossible. While Diria requires all of its coffee to be picked by hand, thus allowing the farmer to pick only the best coffee on each pass through the field, Robusta is picked by machines, eliminating the ability to be discerning in what is picked. The result is an overall lower quality of coffee. Arabica has a much smaller number of cherries per plant, meaning more nutrients, and more taste, go into each coffee bean!

If your coffee started it's life like this, it's Arabica.

All of the coffee that is brought into Diria is picked by hand. This allows the farmers to go down the row of coffee plants and only pick the coffee that is ripe and ready for processing. This results in a higher quality coffee, but requires that the farmer make as many as six or seven passes down the row over the course of a harvest season. When coffee is picked, it is in “cherry” form. The cherry that surrounds the coffee bean is filled with sugar. If the coffee is not processed very quickly from when it is picked, the sugars start to ferment, resulting in a bitter and acidic coffee.

Coffee measuring bins

When farmers bring in their coffee, it is measured as it is unloaded, ensuring each farmer is paid his or her fair share of the profits when Diria sells the coffee on the world market. Currently, about half of Diria’s farms are producing organic coffee. It requires seven years without use of chemicals on the land for the coffee that is grown there to be considered organic. Diria faces the challenge of convincing its farmers that it is worth seven years of lower yields before receiving a slightly higher payout for organic coffee. Once the coffee is measured it is divided into organic and non-organic. The cherries are then washed and soaked in water for a few hours to soften the cherries and to make it easier to extract the bean from the cherry. They are then run through what is essentially a squeezer, that squeezes the bean out of the cherry, the cherries are taken to a large, open air warehouse for storage until their later use (I’ll get back to this). The water used to soak and clean the cherries is pumped down to large holding tanks (I’ll get back to this, too). The beans are sorted by size. The larger the bean, the higher the quality, and the higher the going rate on the world market.

After sorting, the beans are set out to dry. Diria has large concrete patios on which the beans are spread for drying. Sun drying is good for two reasons. First, it doesn’t require the burning of any type of fuel, so no fuel is used, and no pollution is dispatched into the environment. Second, it’s free. It does require constant stirring and turning, but that is a small price to pay for the environmental and economic advantages. High school students are hired for this process during a break from school, which further allows Diria to give back to the local economy. They do use large ovens for final drying, but doing initial drying on the sun patios allows them to use the ovens for three to four hours, instead of over fifty if they went straight into the ovens.

After the final drying, the coffee beans are stored in large bins until the market in Europe or the US is at a good price to sell, or until the next season comes along and they need to make room for the next year’s crop, whichever comes first. When the beans go into the holding bins, they have a husk on them, similar to the husk on a peanut. When the beans are sold, these husks are removed. The husks are stored because they are burned in the final drying ovens instead of using oil or gas powered ovens.

A lot of coffee is shipped to Germany. Nearly all of the decaffeination done in the world is done in Germany. If you’re inclined toward drinking decaf, know that even if you’re in a place where coffee is grown fresh (Costa Rica for example), the decaf you drink has been to Germany and back. The woman who gives our tours said that when people ask for decaf there, she recommends orange juice, because that’s decaf and fresh!

Recognize this? It's a cashew!

The organic farms use a similar approach to anti-pest and anti-disease that is used at Rancho Margot. They plant a lot of other crops in with the coffee to mask the aroma given off by the coffee. Amongst those often planted are citrus fruits, cashews, and hot peppers. This deters pests and disease, as well as giving the farmers another crop to sell throughout the year as an additional source of income. When pesticides are needed, the organic farmers use a natural solution made of things like lemon juice, hot peppers, and water instead of chemicals.

Sedimentation lagoons

I mentioned before that Diria tries not to waste anything from the process. I’ve already talked about how they use the husks from the beans as fuel for the drying ovens. The water that is used for washing the coffee cherries is filled with all kinds of stuff that, before the use of the holding tanks, was pumped directly into the rivers and turned the rivers a lovely shade of green. Now that water is stored in sedimentation pits. There are a series of three pits. After a certain amount of time to settle out in the first one, the water is pumped to the second, and then again to the third. Most of the sugars that were absorbed into the water settle out by this time, but some remains. This water, rather than getting dumped into the river, is pumped to a neighboring farm for use in irrigation. The remaining sugars in the water act as nutrients for his crops. By the end of the dry season all three sedimentation pits are dry, and the sugars that have settled out are dug out of the pits and loaded into trucks to be distributed to the co-op’s farmers as a natural fertilizer.

Discarded cherries

The cherries that are removed from outside the coffee beans are also used. They are put into large troughs that are filled with worms. These worms compost the cherries into extremely rich soil. The soil is used in the greenhouses to start new coffee plants, sent to the farms to enrich the soil, and sold to hotels and offices that use them in the gardens and indoor planting.

Worms!

Diria does its best not to create waste, and turn everything that would normally be considered byproduct into something useful and profitable. It’s a great operation that is a model of what the coffee industry should be all about. Unfortunately, not all coffee plantations offer this high standard of quality, not only in their coffee, but in the standard of treatment of their farmers. Organic and fair trade coffee are the future of what coffee production should be world wide. Supporting companies that strive for high standards of both will make a huge difference for coffee agriculture worldwide.

For more info, check out:

http://www.coocafe.com/coopepilangosta_coffee.htm

I’ve been promising updates on some more of the cool stuff from Costa Rica, but the last few weeks have been crazy. I spent my week off in Costa Rica checking out some new stuff for next year’s trips, changing some stuff for the last trip this year, and spending some quality vacation time. The last trip in Costa Rica was a bit of a whirlwind followed by a rush to get everything cleaned up, packed up and stored before returning to the States.

I landed MSP last Tuesday and hung in Minneapolis for about 36 hours before packing up my car and driving to Vermont, where I’ve been since Saturday night. I’ve been enjoying some time hanging out with friends and doing all I can not to think about work at all.

I briefly mentioned Rancho Margot in one of my past blogs. It is a self sufficient, organic ranch that sits tucked into a valley between Monteverde, the Children’s Eternal Rain Forest, and Volcan Arenal.

The Children’s Eternal Rain Forest (CERF) is a large reserve that borders the Monteverde reserve. In 1987 a group of students in Europe decided that they could do something to help with the destruction of rainforest in Central and South America. They worked to collect a huge amount of money, money that was used to purchase a large block of rainforest in Costa Rica. Through bake sales, recycling collections, and private donations, the original purchase was for just over 10 acres of land in 1988. In the nearly 20 years that has passed since the original purchase, the organization has grown to include schools all over Europe, and the reserve has grown to over 54,000 acres.

So, back to Rancho Margot: The vision of Rancho Margot is to be a fully self sufficient and organic ranch, with an emphasis on protection of the rainforest around it and education of the tourists who visit it.

Amongst its projects:

RM has an up and running dairy operation. Its small herd of dairy cows is milked daily to provide milk for the restaurant. Extra milk is used in a cheese production facility that they have built. This cheese is both used in the restaurant and sold on site. They also have a large number of free range chickens that produce eggs for the restaurant. In the works is a hog facility for pork for their restaurant.

With the large number of cattle and hogs that they will have on the ranch, they decided to make use of some of the “natural byproduct.” They are building a processing plant to convert manure into a natural gas that will be used to heat their hot tubs and in the kitchen for the stoves and ovens.

Speaking of power, the ranch has a small hydroelectric plant. A small portion of a stream that runs through the ranch is diverted through a hydroelectric turbine and then back out into the stream. The result is completely clean, byproduct free electricity. Enough electricity is produced to power the entire ranch: guest rooms and restaurant included.

There are huge organic gardens that grow just about everything you can imagine: lettuce, carrots, cilantro, cashews, coconuts, beets, radishes, just to name a few! The food is used in the restaurant to make some of the freshest salads and side dishes you can imagine. Even though large quantities of each food are grown in the gardens, only small batches of each are found in one spot. Growing small patches dispersed throughout the gardens is a way of deterring bugs and diseases. Large patches draw in more bugs and allow disease to spread more easily. Because most diseases are distinct to each plant, by dividing up the crop, even if one plant gets sick, the disease doesn’t spread to the entire crop.

Beyond the farming aspect of the ranch, Rancho Margot has a lot of other projects going. They have an animal rescue center for animals that are injured in the wild or that are kept in captivity. The goal is to rehabilitate these animals for return to the jungles. Most of the animals in the rescue center now have been rescued from hotels that kept the monkeys in small cages without much room to move or kept the toucans in the lobbies with wings clipped.

A ranch the size of Rancho Margot, with as many projects as it has in the works, needs a lot of help. RM relies heavily on volunteers. It has a large program in place of language school. Volunteers come in to work in the gardens, help with the animals, or build new accommodations, and in exchange they receive two to three hours per day of language training, and reduced rates on the room and board.

Even those only interested in being on vacation will find a great home for a few days at Rancho Margot. RM offers horseback rides, hikes, bike tours, waterfall climbing and rappelling, kayak tours and so much more. With three levels of accommodations – high level private bungalows, mid level field house and budget backpackers’ dorms – there is a place for anyone on any budget.

We discovered Rancho Margot by accident. We finished up a day of work early during our Final Trip Prep and decided to go for a quick ride. We knew there was a road that went out past Volcan Arenal and alongside Lago Arenal. We didn’t think we could use it on trip because, as far as we knew it didn’t go anywhere, but we thought we would ride it anyway. We had some extra time, and from time to time it’s nice to do a ride that we don’t do on trip. We got out to the end of the road and there was Rancho Margot. After a quick tour of the ranch we decided it was something that had to be included in our trip. It’s great when you kind of accidentally stumble upon something that becomes a really awesome feature of the trip.

For more info, visit: www.ranchomargot.org

And to prove things don't always go as planned...

Wow, was that a week...

Overall, it was a good trip, but we had some rather "unique" experiences along the way.

Things got off to a rather interesting start. The first night, our trip stays at Turrialtico, just outside Turrialba, near where we start our day two rafting trip. It's a very unique place, sitting at the base of two volcanoes. Needless to say, it is a bit of a volatile are, geologically speaking. We were all shaken awake at 4:30am by a pretty intense earthquake. It wasn't enough to do any damage, but we all got a good start and woke to the ceiling fans above us doing quite an interesting dance.

Things went pretty smoothly again until the third day, when on the ride one of the guests and I crashed into each other while riding across a little stream. Neither of us were hurt but for some scrapes and bruises, but it's not ideal when guides crash into guests. It definitely provided a good story for the day though.

The final bummer of the trip came on the last full day of the trip. We were out kayaking and hanging out on the beach, and at some point someone got into our bus and stole three people's backpacks. Our driver was with the bus the entire time, so the best we can figure is that there was about a 45 second window when we unloaded that everyone was looking at the river, and the person must have gotten into the bus then. It was a huge downer at that point in the trip. The guests had trip insurance to cover the lost goods, but you still hate to see that happen. We thought we were being careful before, now we're going to be extra vigilant for the last trip.

As I'm writing this, I realize I haven't really written a post about everything we do on the trip, so here's a quick rundown.

Day 1: We pick up the guests in San Jose, the capitol of Costa Rica, and shuttle to the top of Volcan Irazu (which I talked about in last week's post). We have a picnic lunch on top of the volcano and descend about 8,000 feet to La Pastora before shuttling the last 20 minutes into the hotel (our hotel is on top of a big hill, and no one feels like riding it).

Day 2: Rafting on the Rio Pacuare! The Pacuare River was named by National Geographic as one of the top ten best day trip rafting trips in the world. Filled with class 3 and 4 rapids, the guests rarely get a chance to be bored on this rafting trip, but there are a couple places where it chills out enough to get out and swim. It's an awesome day, and everyone is worn out enough to sleep through the transfer at the end of the day to our hotel near Volcan Arenal, in La Fortuna.

Day 3: We ride out, around Volcan Arenal and along the shore of Lago Arenal (Lake Arenal) to Rancho Margot. Rancho Margot is a really cool organic ranch where we do a tour and have a fantastic lunch (next week I'm doing a full feature on Rancho Margot). That evening we go to a local woman's house, where she prepares a truly Tico meal for us. It's all typical Costa Rican food, rice and beans, barbecued chicken and pork, tortillas, and more! It's an amazing cultural experience.

Day 4: Today we walk through the rainforest! With two local naturalists as guides, we take a 2.5 hour hike through La Reserva de los Dendrobates. This is a reserve that surrounds not only the local water supply, but is also an area filled with little poison dart frogs (dendrobates). The most common here are the blue jeans frogs, named for their blue legs on red bodies (see photo album). From there we go up to Cataratas La Fortuna (La Fortuna waterfall), where we have a picnic lunch, hike down and do some swimming near the base of the waterfall (but not too near!). Finishing out our busy day is the canopy tour, where we go through a series of 13 ziplines through the tops of the trees of the rainforest. Everyone loves it (unless they're afraid of heights that is, as we are as much as 250 feet off the ground). The final zipline is over 1000 feet long and swings down over a river.

Day 5: We start out this morning with a boat ride across Lake Arenal, followed by a bus transfer to Hojancha. In Hojancha, we visit Cafe Diria, a coffee co-op that does a lot with organic and fair trade coffee. (More on Cafe Diria to come) We ride from Diria to our hotel on the Pacific Ocean, El Sueno Tropical.

Day 6: Time for vacation! We give the guests the morning to hang around town and shop, or sleep in, or lay by the pool, or whatever they want. In the afternoon we kayak down Rio Oro (Gold River) to the ocean where we hang out, boogie board, and just enjoy the beach! After kayaking we head into town for our final night dinner together at El Lagarto (The Alligator) which is a great barbeque place on the beach that serves the most amazing grilled steak and fish and veggies!

Day 7: Sorry kids, time to go home. We board a plane at 11:00am for a 40 minute flight into San Jose and send everyone home to recover from their vacation. Despite the dirt runway, no actual airport, and little twin prop plane, most of the guests prefer this to the five hour bus ride.

Ciao for now!

PS. 07 web album is up at http://picasaweb.google.com/jonvickphotography/CostaRica07

Whoa, first trip done.

Amazing how that happens. I was for a week looking forward to the first trip finally starting. I’d overhauled bikes, searched out new bike routes, met new subcontractors and reacquainted with old ones, but mostly had traversed close to 1500 kilometers in a rented mini-SUV, and I was ready to see everything we had done roll into a trip. I wanted everything to work!

Now the first trip is done, and… well… everything worked! The trip went great. The new stuff went well. The guests were great. It was, as we say, SMOOOOVE.

Quick side note: My new goal in this blog is to highlight one or two things from the trip every week. That way I won’t get to an area, do one trip, one mega-huge blog entry, and then not write again for three months. So this is an experiment. After the events of the last week, the obvious place to start is with Volcanoes! Why is that the obvious choice, you might ask? I’ll get to that.

We start our trip, after a pickup in the capital of Costa Rica, San Jose, with a 1.5 hour shuttle to the top of Volcan Irazu. Irazu is one of Costa Rica’s seven active volcanoes. The last major eruption was in 1996, but it’s most famous eruption was on March 13, 1963, when it erupted the day President John F. Kennedy landed in San Jose for an official visit. Standing at 11,260 feet, Irazu is Costa Rica’s highest volcanic point, making the hike out to the edge of the inner crater much more strenuous than it looks! The water in the inner crater varies in color from day to day, from bright green (see below) to blood red. (Side note again: Costa Rica’s highest point is Cerro Chirripo, at 12,526 feet. Sometimes it even freezes there! It’s a three day trip to get there: a day to rent a horse or mule to carry your gear to the top and hike to the top, a day to recover from the hike to the top, and a day to return to the bottom. I’d love to go, but that will have to wait for next year, as the station on the top is rented out at least three months in advance.) We start our first ride from the top of Irazu and descend close to 8,000 feet before the ride rolls into Turrialba. We stay the first night at Turrialtico, with views of Volcan Turrialba, one of Costa Rica’s many dormant volcanoes.

On day two we transfer into La Fortuna, a tourist filled town at the base of Volcan Arenal. Arenal is Costa Rica’s most visited volcano because it’s the most exciting. Arenal has constant activity. Because it lies in the heart of the Costa Rican rainforest, Arenal is unfortunately usually surrounded by clouds. The moist air slams into this volcano that stands high above the rest of the landscape and immediately forms a cloud that surrounds the volcano. It’s a rare day that the clouds break for even ten minutes for a totally clear view of the volcano. Most people get excited about a chance to maybe see what might be a little of the top of the volcano. We had two days of mostly clear viewing of the volcano. During the day, if you look closely at the volcano, you can see what looks like little puffs of dust or smoke rolling down the mountain as the volcano spews lava down its sides. Larger eruptions create thunderous echoes across the valley below. Nighttime is the more spectacular time to see the volcano though. Even with clouds, you can often see glowing red lava rolling down the volcano below the clouds, and with the clear night skies we were given some truly once in a lifetime views of the volcano. I’ve included day and night photos of Arenal for your viewing pleasure. That’s all for now. Peace out and Pura Vida!

FTP done... bring on the trip.

Well, we're done with the trip prep whirlwind. Things went more or less smoothly. I actually got some riding in, which is rare on an FTP. I did some reading. Also rare. There's nothing really that we already know we have to change before trip number two. Also rare. Things are good.

We spent the last three nights in Samara, which is near where our final hotel for the trip is, and where we essentially spend the entire full day of the trip. We spent enough time there that I'm pretty comfortable with the town. It's cool to be in Costa Rica to do a trip and know what I'm talking about. As opposed to last year, when if a guest had a question, my response was, "I don't know. Ask Monica or Zack. Is there anything I can carry or fix for you???"

We returned to Alajuela today (actually Barrio San Jose, an even smaller town outside of Alajuela, which is outside of San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica).


Costa Rica so far has been good. I've gotten some sun, which always makes me a happy camper. I've gotten to do some reading. A lot of reading actually. I've already ready two books since being here, small books, but books nonetheless. I'm definitely ready for the trips to start. It's been a lot of buildup, a lot of buildup, a lot of buildup and now it's just time to get this ship rolling.

Hasta Luego!

This is my first post in my new blog. I've transferred over from my old blog at:
http://jonvicktt.livejournal.com/

Please hold for my first real post, in the meantime, enjoy this photo from Costa Rica.

Pura Vida!