Savusavu, Fiji

I had booked a tour at J Hunter Pearl, but messed up the booking, asking for Monday Nov 15 (it’s actually Mon 14 and Tue 15). They had us down for Tue 15 :(

So headed over to see if KokoMana cocoa & chocolate was open. Luckily they were, with a tour starting shortly at 10am. They were waiting for a couple guests from some other resort but they ended up canceling so we had a private tour for two :)

We’ve been on a couple other chocolate tours on other trips, and both of those started with the dried fermented cocao bean. The tour here however, started with the cocao trees. We found this part just as interesting!

Our guide showed us various species of cocao, both flowering and in various stages of ripeness. They’ve also started growing plants that go well with chocolate - like vanilla, chilli, ginger, coconut. We’d never seen and vanilla plant before!

We saw the cocao pods being husked (split open and the beans separated), and tried a fresh pod (you just eat the pulp, which is slightly sweet).

The pods are then allowed to ferment, after which they are sun-dried, and then stored for months.

They didn’t have any production today so we just moved onto the best part of the tour, the tastings :)

We sampled I think seven different types, our favourites included the chocolate & chai, and chocolate & ginger.

The whole tour was just under two hours and we really enjoyed it.

After we drove back to town, and tried to find the art gallery in the Copra Shed Marina that was mentioned in the Moon guide book. We found out later that the owner had passed away a few years ago and the shop was no more.

The rest of the day was pretty casual.