Grenada

{Concord Falls}

We spent most of last week in Grenada. We were there from Saturday, the 5th - Thursday, the 10th. (I've gotten a little bit behind!) We started out with a little grocery shopping that Saturday to restock and Sunday we were able to catch a little bit of conference, which was nice! On Monday we took our first field trip. It was really fun and super nice for us all to be able to get off the boat and stretch our legs together! We rented a large taxi that we could all fit in and made several stops. Grenada is 21 miles long, 12 miles wide, and is made up of various parishes. I think I was able to get a good feel for what the island was like driving through each one. I loved it! Our first stop was Concord Falls. There were a couple of locals fishing for crawfish there and it was quite beautiful. I would have loved to jump in if I’d had my swimsuit on!

{Serious cuteness going on here!}

Second stop: a nutmeg factory. It seemed to be super old-fashioned, which I thought was really interesting! A tour guide took us through the factory and explained how the nuts are processed. Hurricane Ivan (2004) destroyed 90% of the nutmeg trees on the island. I think our guide said it would take a full ten years before all of the trees would grow back to allow for full production. Apparently there are two other factories in Grenada that aren’t being used at this time. The nutmegs are shipped all over the world!

Third stop: Leaper’s Hill. We had to walk through a graveyard to get to the monument, as you can see below. The view was beautiful, but it was a creepy place! You can probably read the plaque below, but when the French invaded the island and things got rough the remaining Caribs chose to end their lives by jumping off the hill. (The hill being a cliff.)

Fourth stop: The Belmont Estate, which is a popular tourist attraction here. It was our favorite pit-stop! The Belmont Estate is a chocolate factory! I’ve seen the plant chocolate is made from a couple of times, but I had no idea how in the heck chocolate was actually made from it!

{Cocoa plant}

Our tour guide walked us through the whole process, which was fascinating! The Belmont Estate is made of up approximately 400 acres of crops. The trees that produce the chocolate fruit make up 300 acres. They mix banana, orange, and other fruit trees in to give the chocolate fruit a little added flavor. (I don’t really understand why, because the chocolate itself doesn’t taste fruity! But whatever.) Our guide showed us the fruit and then showed us how it is processed. Inside the fruit are several “beans”. It takes about 40 – 60 of these beans to make a chocolate bar.

{Cocoa beans - ignore the fact that I look bald! Yikes.}

The beans are placed inside a large stall where they are covered with banana leaves and bags to ferment for about six days. Our guide let us feel the beans, which were super stinky as you can imagine! Yuck. The temperatures generated can get up to about 113 degrees!

 After the beans are fermented they are placed outside to dry for preservation. They are placed on huge wooden trays that can slide underneath an indoor, greenhouse-type drying area when it rains. Employees walk barefoot through the beans every half hour to speed up the process. Our guide let us take off our shoes to walk through them, which I thought was pretty dang legit! (I'm obviously a tactile learner. ;) )

We ended by watching a video that walked us through the rest of the steps. They gave us some hot chocoloate and regular chocolate to sample. Unfortunately, for me, they only make dark chocolate at that particular factory! EW. Our tour guide also let the kids see some of the animals they keep there – some monkeys and parrots. The kids loved watching them!

All in all it was a pretty good day!

XOXO