I love life! Its totally incredible! Two days ago I took a group of friends and friends of friends out to the Gunung Kawi temple and waterfalls where I had an incredible experience last year. It was really sweet to share it with all of these people and see their eyes open so wide when they came up to the waterfall.
That was pretty cool, but yesterday was totally epic! I was finally going to see the Big Tree Farms (big raw Balinese chocolate company) production facility. It was only twenty minutes outside of Ubud, but my driver had absolutely no idea where he was going and it took us a full three hours to get there! Quite an adventure of its own! I just stayed mellow the whole time and let the driver handle it. As you'll see later in the story, this delay was perfect to set up what is about to happen. I walked into the all-bamboo building and they informed me that the owner Ben Ripple was in the middle of a meeting, but that I was welcome to sit in. As it turns out, he was making a major presentation to representatives of the Indonesian Trade Ministry on the worldwide trade of cacao, past, present, and future. Two veteran European businessman, Serge and Simon were also there just checking out the production facility and sitting in on the presentation. It was really fascinating to learn about this side of the chocolate world that I really didn't have that much knowledge of previously. Then as the presentation wrapped up, one of the sales ladies, Afi took Serge, Simon, and I on a tour of the whole facility. It was really cool to see all the machines used in the processing- everything from peeling beans, to crushing them to nibs, stone grinding them into cacao paste over 15-20 hours, and then either packaging it from there or pressing it into powder and butter. Along the way, I started sharing some of my cacao knowledge with the group and they were pretty stoked with me to say the least. Pretty soon Serge and Simon were adamantly trying to convince Afi that Big Tree absolutely needed to hire me right away :) I planted a few seeds of some business ideas I had in the chocolate and tonic bar world with Serge and Simon and they were quite enthralled...
I was planning on leaving tomorrow to go chase waves on Nusa Lembongan, but the Big Tree crew and Serge and Simon invited me to come make my chocolate for them on Friday and talk business... So I'm going with the flow and hanging in Ubud until Saturday morning... who knows what will happen, but it will be great! Then I went to a fantastic kirtan last night... it was dark in the room and the man next to me wasn't wearing his usual hat... I realized only at the end that I was sitting next to Dave Stringer the whole night! So funny!
The adventure continues!
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