July 7: Life Monteverde!

Friday, July 7th

This morning a group of our students woke up at 6AM to hike around our hotel’s incredible mountainside property. We gathered at 8AM for a hearty buffet breakfast at our hotel before boarding our bus to spend the day at Life Monteverde.

Life Monteverde is an association of 20 families with deep roots in coffee, agriculture, conservation, and education. For over four generations, the families have grown, processed and roasted the best quality coffee in the Monteverde Region, striving for harmony with the surrounding cloud forest.

Life, to them, means Low Impact for Earth. Since 2008, Life Monteverde has organized educational activities for local people and visitors like us. The objective is to help people achieve more awareness about sustainability in their day-to-day activities. The Life Monteverde programs are carried out in a 42-acre (17 hectares) farm and extend to the whole region of Monteverde. The farm combines areas of coffee production, conservation, organic agriculture and low environmental impact energy systems.

Sam Blyth’s education programs have been coming to Life Monteverde for over a decade. Our group spent the day learning and working on the farm. We were treated to a local Costa Rican lunch.

At the end of the day, students had an opportunity to learn about the coffee making process. They even got to taste 6 different types of coffee! We were all more than happy to load up on this incredible, organic, ethically sourced coffee.

We returned to our hotel and had some time to shower and relax before dinner.

After dinner, the entire group got together for a movie night! With plenty of popcorn, chips and drinks we all got comfortable and watched a movie. Well, most of us. Some decided to work on their science project while watching the movie.

After a long day, everyone was more than happy to get some well deserved rest.

We have a very early morning hike tomorrow in the Monteverde Cloud Forest!

We can’t wait to tell you all about it!

Bertan