The Beach!!! and Monday

It has been a very busy last few days. It ended up being a 20 hour road trip to get to the beach in Bahia on Sunday. We got there about 11:00 am and stayed until 6:00. It was a gorgeous beach and we had time to relax, sun bath (some got more sun than others), enjoy the ocean, and walk around to experience the culture of Bahia. Bahia is a different region in Brazil in that it is mostly all African American’s. There is not the diversity that you see elsewhere in Brazil. We also had dinner at a typical street restaurant where there were many more choices of juices. Fruits that we were unaware even existed. It was 11:00 pm before we got back to the hotel. You will have to ask the guys about their speedos. Great O-H-I-O’s!!






Monday we were up early and toured CEPLAC, a National Cocoa Research Center. We were able to see the process of making chocolate and even tasted a sample of 50% chocolate which is almost a premier chocolate. It was interesting to hear about the different uses of the various percentages of chocolate. We started in the cocoa fields and learned about the growth and disease of the plants. We opened up the pod and saw a gooey, slimy material around the cocoa bean. We tasted the gooey material and most actually broke open the bean and tasted the inside of the bean. It is the gooey material that makes white chocolate. I will have to say the sensory skills of students were active today. We then visited the lab that produces chocolate but it is focused on research rather than production.






After that we stopped at a sloth refuge center and were able to see the sloths up close. The curator was holding a 2 month old baby that lost it’s mother and was brought to the center and an older sloth who had lost a foot in the electric wires. They were enjoying being held by the curator. There were other sloths that we watched for a while and learned about their behavior, habits and habitat.





We then stopped at Biofabrica which produces papaya plants for the farmers and we learned the steps in starting a papaya plant from a cutting to the planting in the field. We also observed banana farm and learned a little bit about bananas. This farmer emphasized that bananas need a canopy of taller trees for protection and they did not like full sun.


Then we headed toward Teixeira de Freitas/BA arriving about midnight.