Today we traveled back to Sarapiqui to visit family owned banana farm. The plantation was beautiful and our guide Francini was very helpful. We had a quick tour of the plantation learning about the process of how bananas grow along with other fruits and spices. She also showed us her house where we met her super cute 4 year old daughter Victoria, and her mother made us lunch.

Francini is an entrepreneur who is always looking for ways to improve the community with agrotourism, so this made the visit pretty intriguing. Agrotourism is a type of tourism that involves visiting farms, ranches, and plantations (basically out whole trip!). Francini designs her family farm around teaching the community and visitors about sustainable farming. Agrotourism is a hard business to maintain because it requires a lot of visitors and advertisement. I think the community helps with this by attending tours and learning the information from them, and then helping to spread the word. The main difference I noticed between a small family farm and a conventional farm, is the lack of machinery and workers. I believe all of the fruit is picked by hand and processed by a few different people instead of a whole crew.

After our lunch at Francini’s home we headed down the road to another little farm. This farm had many different plants such as: peppercorn, vanilla, cacao, etc. I enjoyed learning about these different plants despite the INSANE AMOUNT OF BUGS. I learned some fun facts in between each of my leg slaps (trying to get the bugs to go away). My favorite fun fact I learned today was: vanilla grows as a type of orchid!