Interestingly enough you can actually taste if the beans were dried naturally in the sun or machine dried and they only take the best beans into the pure coffee that Costa Rica is famous for. I was surprised to hear that the decaffeinated coffee actually gets send over to Germany because they have the best machines to take the caffeine out of the beans and then end up sending it back to Costa Rica. Apparently they don't pay more than the transport since they keep the caffeine and sell it to companies like red bull and coca cola. Fascinating global economy...
In any case, we then took a cab which was outrageously expensive from our ecolodge to our next hotel, a treehouse in Santa Clara. The can driver was nice and told us a little bit about his view of Costa Rica. Apparently people here think that a lot has been happening and that they have done quite well but also see that the country could do a lot better than it currently is given all the natural resources they have. He said that they were still a Central American country and their government was not well run. He also said that while most people in the tourism industry are bilingual a lot of people in the country aren't and there is also still a lot of poverty here.
I asked about any tensions between foreign investors and the indigenous, tica population and he agreed that there had been some disagreements. Not surprising, since they come in a wanted to make the beaches private beaches reserved for tourists only for instance..
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