Venezuelan vacation

Catherine Quinn on the trip of a lifetime to Venezuela's Paria Peninsula

The Paria Peninsula in south-America must be where chocoholics go to die. Since Columbus's uneventful first landing here (he shipped out west in search of gold) the region has grown, harvested, and eaten chocolate in astonishing quantity. Shaped like a finger, pointing north from Venezuela, this slim stretch of land is banked from coast to coast with cocoa trees, peeking from the flanks of jungle.

Many varieties grow in abundance, but for gourmets there is one kind of cocoa worth the wealth of the New World. Criollo cacao is by far the most precious of cocoa species, and grows most prolifically in Paria - otherwise known as the "chocolate coast".

A number of plantations still operate traditional methods to process the cocoa, making supplies of the precious bean integral to local economy. One such plantation is Hacienda Bukare, which has recently opened a small number of guest rooms for tourists interested in the process of growing chocolate.

A chocolate farm in the jungle?

As a certified chocoholic I'd had my own visions of what staying at a chocolate farm might be like. I pictured waking to a frothy cup of chocolate, photographing lush fields of cocoa, and chomping through bullion sized bars of chocolate. But sucking on raw cocoa beans, in the middle of the south-American jungle had not played a part in my prescience. Unlike coffee or tea, cocoa will only grow sheltered within dense thickets of jungle. And the best way to replicate this environment, quite simply, is to use the real thing.

 

 

"The cocoa plantation has been described as 'green anarchy'"

 

 

 

So explains Billy Esser, the plantation owner, who has just cracked open a fresh pod, and scooped out the beans for me to taste. "The trees grow where they want to grow, and the pickers remember where each tree is when it's time to harvest." Chocolate plantations, it would seem, are more Indiana Jones, than Bridget.

Fresh from the pod, cocoa beans are coated in a sweet, creamy substance, tasting similar to mango. But the actual beans are bitter, and must undergo a lengthy process of drying and fermentation before they can be used for chocolate. The cocoa trees are small and ordinary looking, excepting the vivid purple-red pods which seem to have sprung fully-formed from the slender trunks. Whilst criollo cacao is usually too delicate to grow in abundance, here it is so endemic as to grow in backyards, and families sell their diminutive cocoa crops to local farmers.

Everyone's in on it

Driving through the region, we pass impromptu villages of tin shacks with home-made signage for "Cocoa Criollo" every few metres. The green and red symbol of Criollo leaf and pod is displayed like a jaunty tattoo, on numerous shops and buildings. A small barn, barely large enough to keep a few horses, proudly brands itself a "cocoa factory", with the characteristic leaf and pod painted cheerily on the exterior wall. As my jeep turns the corner, the dirt-track is suddenly pavemented with a brick-red swathe of cocoa beans - evidence of the "factory" production technique.

At the roadside two boys nonchalantly work the beans back and forth, allowing them maximum exposure to the sun. It seems the entire economical psyche of this small region is bound-up in the illustrious lure of cocoa. Almost every other home has a fistful of beans drying on the front-porch, and shops stack dark bullion-slabs of chocolate alongside maize, potato-chips, and sticky Coca Cola.

Read on for more about the Hacienda Bukare...      Next  >>>

© 2004 Catherine Quinn & seventypercent.com