Dole Plantations

The banana plantation

SFS must love torturing its students! Making us choose between the much needed sleep after the jam-packed days and other crazy, awesome experiences that we will only have once. Again, I got up at 5:30am to join Edgardo, our Tropical Ecology professor, for some morning birding. Fortunately, the pain of an early morning was well worth it! Before we even left, I spotted my first Toucan! I feel like I've checked off an important goal and could just go home now! Of course, I won't and as we left the hotel lobby with Edgardo, I was amazed once again. Toucans, Colored Araçaris, Collared Trogon, and plenty of humming birds. As we crossed the bridge, we also saw a big and serious iguana and a terrified opossum, caught in one of the researcher's traps.

After la Tirimbina, we entered some of the largest mono-crop farms on the side of the world. Costa Rica's main agricultural exports include coffee, pineapple and bananas, making it the 7th biggest producer of bananas world wide. Dole plantations produce an absurd amount of bananas and is a crazy sight to see.

Looking up into a banana bunch still growing on the tree.
They are wrapped in plastic to protect against bruising and insects!

Bananas are not technically a tree but a giant herb, and can be grown year round because of the wet and hot climate here. The bananas we eat today are not however necessarily, completely natural because they are all the same genetic could and no plants are actually fertilized. The whole operation was intense and causes some tension in communities due to the instability of jobs and the increase in immigrants from Nicaragua.

The tour of the facilities, all of which are open air, was actually pretty interesting. Our tour guide was very full of himself and was clearly used to entertaining large tour groups from cruise ships and avoided the hard questions about pesticide and fertilizer use with ease. Still, it was crazy to see how so many bananas were grown and shipped all over the world without causing any overrippening and bruising!

The Dole processing facilities

A "banana train" waiting to get
packaged and shipped.