They've got an awful lot of coffee...

coffee blossoms and banana tree

Once the majority of the ants had been removed from my person, the four of us, (me cursing for wearing black socks that camouflaged the attackers, Laura inspecting my limbs while translating Julia's apology, that she'd meant to get to burning the nest and simply hadn't gotten to it yet, and Mike, still poorly hiding his amusement) I insisted that the plantation tour must continue, ants or no ants.

In this spirit, then, I tried to be discrete while finding new ants scurrying over and biting bits of me upon which they oughtn't have been.

There is nothing like being stung between the toes by an ant while trying to smash it though your sock while balancing on the other foot. Discretely. It must have looked beyond idiotic as I wobbled and pinched and tried not to fall to the jungle floor where goodness knows what other delights lurked.

The correct way to say "I have ants in my pants but don't worry about it" in Spanish is "tengo hormigas en mis pantalones, de nada." Laura nicely told Julia this for me.

Julia gave me an uncertain look but rose to the occasion and began to teach us about growing that beautiful gift of the gods to mankind: coffee.

Ah, coffee. It begins life as a bean, throwing down roots and then coming up through the soil in a Dr. Suess-ish way, the round bean perched on top of a slender green stem. Eventually the bean cracks to reveal leaves inside.

Being slightly obsessed with coffee, (had you noticed?) I tried and tried to grow my own coffee plant from beans I brought back from another plantation in Kona, Hawaii. The little sprouts would shoot up, give me hope...and then the weight of the bean would bend and break the stem, shrivel and die, leaving me depressed and with a sense of guilt. I got leaves once or twice, but in the end, always the same. Sad, dead little failed bit of life.

Julia thought perhaps it was the lack of warm, moist jungle air that caused me such grief.

However, if you do manage to grow your coffee plant, you have to wait several years. Then you have a nice little bush, and, with any luck, it flowers, starlike white blossoms

which turn into the much-loved beans, hidden inside bright red berries, generally two to each fruit.

Sadly, there had been rains at exactly the wrong time for the current crop, so there were far fewer flowers than usual, Julia explained through Laura. Many of the berries had spoiled before the beans inside could develop. Again, Julia apologised, again, unnecessarily.  The life of a farmer, after all, is one of hard work, swarms of angry insects, and unhelpful weather. Honest and real.

When the coffee fruits, called cherries, are ripe they are selectively harvested by hand and put in a container of water to soak. The good ones sink while the bad ones float to the top to be removed.

The heavy fruits that sank are put into a sort of de-pulper that, hand-turned with a crank, roughly grinds off the berry, leaving two beans from each berry with some pulp still attached, behind.

Except for the peaberries, which happen about one per 20 fruits picked. The bean is fatter with only one per fruit, and they're sorted out for special treatment, roasting, and garner a higher price.

All the beans ferment for a time, are washed again, any foreign material, sticks or leaves, for instance, is removed, and, now clean, are spread out to dry in the sun.

They are raked and turned to expose all surfaces to the light, and having them laid out on concrete works well, since it heats up so beautifully.

Dogs tend to hang out with the beans on the warm slabs as well, like this one at a neighbor's farm; good spot for a nap.

Finally, after they are perfectly dry, the "green" beans are sifted to remove chaff, carefully sorted by size and quality, the heaviest being considered the best, then packed into burlap sacks for market.

Or better, roasted. Roasted in a pan over a stone, wood-burning stove, constantly agitated as the beans swell and brown and make crackling sounds, releasing incredible aromas and becoming shiny with oils.

This, my friends, is magic.

Food chemistry at its finest, and an art besides: that little glass bottle (above) contains an elixir of incredibly strong coffee. I never did find out how the coffee got from bean to bottle of enticingly dark and highly concentrated goodness, but Juan was very proud of it. He could bring it to us with his huge smile and near-ritual ceremony, as well as the good "company" cups and hot water.

You would pour just a bit into your cup, then add hot water to bring it down to the shade of strong you want. The aroma was intoxicating. The flavor...well, you had to be there to believe it. Amazing.

Back from beneath the trees, seated at the table with the blue-and-white tablecloth, we made and sipped our exquisite coffees, breathing deeply the cooling night air, listening as the jungle came alive, and sighing in total contentment.

Julia and her daughter were in the rustic kitchen, pots clattering on the stove, as they put the finishing touches on what promised to be a memorable meal, bug repellant had been reapplied to all our exposed bits, I'd daubed a good amount of ointment on my ant bites; this was the life.

**********

Postscript: I was reading an account that Captain Albert W Stevens wrote in 1926  for National Geographic describing his experiences in the Amazon, and he made me smile. Here is some of what he has to say about coffee and ants:

Ants appear in one's food always, whether in settlements or in camp. Often one puts a spoonful of native sugar into his cup, skims off the ants from the surface of a little hot water poured in to dissolve the sugar, and then adds coffee. This method seldom removes all the ants, but after the coffee is added they are not readily seen!

You have to appreciate his attitude. I'd take a fellow like that on expedition any day.

Do a little dance...

So there we were in the "eyebrow" of the Amazon jungle, with a translator and a Peruvian plantation owner.

With pride and enthusiasm, Julia ("hoo-lee-ah") showed us how she runs her organic shade farm. With a great deal of knowledge and hard work, we soon learned. There were an overwhelming number of fruits, well beyond the rows and rows of banana trees. 

Several types of oranges (some for juice, some kinds "for the table,") and mandarins to papayas, decorative gourds, mangoes, avocados, a serpentine vine that ended in passion fruits. A passion fruit fresh off the vine is indescribably delicious, full of delectable golden pulp and crunchy seeds. An occassional cacao tree, sadly, not in season.

Which was ironic, since we were technically on a Chocolate tour.

Down by the river, tea plants. I was terribly excited about the tea plants. We'd seen coffee plants before, in Hawaii, but never tea.

tea plant, I think, and river flowing to the Amazon

I have this dream of going and staying on a tea plantation in the Darjeeling region of India...

Also, coca plants. Julia showed us the two tiny veins on either side of the midrib running down the middle of the leaf. That's where the cocaine is, and it only becomes the drug, I learned later, after hundreds of pounds of leaves are dried, chopped, then soaked in gasoline and then extracted with battery acid and lye and goodness knows what other things drug dealers do to it, turning a nice little leaf into a 70 billion (USD) dollar enterprise for sticking up silly noses and the like.

coca leaf

How anyone figured out how to do this is beyond me. I suppose the b in billion was something of a motivator.

Here on the farm, we were eons away from that nonsense. One hoped. In the jungle, who knows what your neighbors are doing? Two thirds of the world's cocaine is from Peru, but not, at least, from Julia and Juan's farm.

Last, but not least, the banana trees. Lots and lots of bananas. With lots and lots of those giant spiders, watching us, reclining like glitterati on enormous webs with their shiny bodies and long legs. 

I was fascinated with the large, reddish-purple banana flowers. Couldn't get a decent photo of one in the failing light to save my life. They hang off the end of a long nubbly branch, weighing about a pound, the bananas sprouting greenly above.

Julia, Laura, and banana flower

The banana trees provide more than sustenance: they provide the requisite shade for the shade-grown coffee. Which is what Mike and I, Pacific Northwesterners and by birthright enamoured of the glossy brown bean, were most interested in.

We thought we were being polite, nodding agreement as we learned about each fruit, how to plant and grow and prune and harvest each tree, si, si, but we were also getting fidgety and anxious; the sun was setting and it would soon be too dark to tell one plant from another. Julia was more observant than we gave her credit for, or perhaps we were less discrete than we intended.  Interrupting herself in the middle of a sentence, she queried, "¿Quieres ver el café, no?"

Yes, we wanted to see the coffee plants. Very much so. Por favor.

We followed Julia and Laura over to a lovely grouping of coffee plants, a few flower with the pure white blossoms, a few bearing the red and green coffee berries. And Julia began to explain to us about the coffee life cycle.

The sun was setting, we were learning about coffee, what could be more idyllic?

Unfortunately, right about then I started yelling, "Ow Ow! Ow! What the hell?! OW!!" and jumping around like a maniac.

This is the good part: I had inadvertently chosen to stand on the entrance to an ant colony.

Now, Peruvian ants are not the friendliest of creatures. These little buggers, and I do mean buggers, had not been pleased at the large personage who had planted herself on top of their home, a hole in the ground, concealed by the shadows of the coming nighttime.

In a masterful plan, and with military precision, they had sent out the troops up and into my shoes and socks, up my legs, past the knee, and when the scouts reached my thighs the silent ant signal to attack was activated. Simultaneously, all began to bite like mad.

"Holy mother of God!" I yelped, jumping about a mile then smacking left and right at my thighs and calves. This had the intended effect of getting me off the nest, fortunately for all involved, but the incident was far from over. Each black ant was biting with fierce intent, their numerous tiny acidic jaws chomping away at my delicate tourist skin.

The assiduously applied bug repellent I'd been so, so careful to use? Absolutely no use in this situation.

Within seconds I was zipping the lower legs of my pants off and doing my best to pick or brush off the attackers, pinching and smashing with little regard for the livelihood of the insects. I was well motivated: they were tenacious little beasts, and everywhere. Most of them were hanging on by their jaws, their bodies sticking out from my legs, their limbs waving frantically as they chewed and bit.

Mike was laughing helplessly, attempting, and failing, to hide it. Julia was looking mortified, and saying something in Spanish, Laura was circling, trying to figure out how to help, and I was still doing the ants in my pants dance.

The freaking ants in pants dance. All dignity down the drain, there.

Welcome to Paradise...

This was the part of our trip to Peru I'd most been looking forward to experiencing; staying overnight at a coffee and cacao plantation with the farmers, Julia and Juan, and their children. Along the dusty little road, their organic farm.



I don't know what I was expecting. I know this wasn't it.

This was better. This was like stepping back in time.


Unassuming, tidy, and welcoming, the air there is citrusy and sweet, a medley of fruits, farm animal and good cooking; air that felt good to breathe.

There was a light breeze, punctuated with unfamiliar bird calls and the motherly clucks of a chicken and her peeping brood scratching at the dirt. Following our guide, Laura, we slipped past the poultry family and a runaway lime on the ground, skirted the coffee bean fermenting trough, and into the sunny, hardworking, joyful world of Julia and Juan. Smiling, salt of the earth people.

We'd barely arrived before Julia was pressing thick, beautiful fresh juices into our hands, Juan, open-armed gesturing for us to sit down on benches at a semi-outdoor table with homey blue and white checked tablecloth. I didn't know it yet, but that tablecloth was to develop a Pavlovian salivary response in me every time we sat down to it. Laura got hugs all around, chattering away in Spanish, telling the story of our trip to exclamations and nods of understanding.

Their son and daughter watched us shyly, and another brother peeped out from the kitchen doorway to see the new guests. This was no tourist spot. This was a home.

Abandoning her comfortable post on the warm concrete slab where coffee beans had been spread out to dry, Chiquita, the cutest dog in all of South America, came snuffling around, looking for handouts.

Chiquita

We were the only guests there to spend the night, but there were two others that were just leaving, an unlikely couple, at first blush. He was a floppy-limbed, messy-haired American fellow, rife with hemp and bead jewelery. This was topped off by a porkpie hat incongruous with the rest of his goofy getup. His eyes, though...eyes on the intense side. Not your run-of-the-mill fun hippie type, then. His companion was a stunningly beautiful woman with a wonderful accent, shiny dark curtain of hair and what can only be described as cutting edge clothing. It got better: she turned out to be an international model from Israel, he a shaman, no less.

Yes, you read that correctly. Peru, and Machu Picchu in particular, is attractive to those in pursuit of the spiritual; mystics and shamans and their followers. He had a touch of the zealot about him, but initially I wrote him off as a new ager Californian abroad. He was also a good photographer, and I admired some instagram shots on his Iphone.

The model was scratching, albeit decorously, at large, angry red insect bites on her shoulders and neck. Mike and I had doused ourselves in bug spray before arriving as we'd been warned repeatedly, emphatically, and with great urgency from all quarters to make sure to have it on at all times in the Amazon jungle. "I only missed these spots and look!" she said, pouting attractively. I handed over some salve from Thailand, which helped.

I am not generally a fan of pouting, but she made it look good.

The shaman began lining up Juan and Julia and the kids for a group shot, something I would have been too shy to attempt. Seizing the opportunity, I pulled out my camera and tried to stand discretely to one side and sneak some shots. This infuriated him, and he roundly cussed me out without bothering to take his eyes off the video screen. "Only one photographer or they won't know which way to look and the photos will be shit!" he snarled.

I suppose I looked wildly startled and lowered my hands guiltily, followed by a surprising rush of anger. The model looked over languidly and, with resign and a half-apology voiced her opinion, "you might as well do as he says. There's no reasoning with him when he gets like this."

Riiiiiight.

He had a point, of course, but I decided then and there I prefer the happy stoned hippy type. Mike and I excused ourselves to go check out our room and give me a moment to gather my wits.

Past the coffee drying slab, and through a wooden door, our room was a delight. A peaceful oasis.

Nothing fancy, mind you; plain, immaculate, and simply furnished,  with a branch to hang our hats. We were instantly charmed.

Lovely windows to open to the banana trees just outside. Banana trees! Charming! With...enormous jewel-like spiders on enormous webs.

Really big spiders. Lots of them.

OK, that's not so charming.

A US dollar bill is 2.6 inches by 6.14 inches. Once of these spiders could sit on the bill and their legs would have gone past the top and bottom of the bill and nearly to the sides. That's not a tarantula, but still. I do believe these spiders

We were told salta, no pica, no pica. In other words, they will jump on you, but not bite.

Oh, good to know.

I informed them, regardless, that I appreciated their bug control and would they please stay outside and that I would do my best to not blunder through any of their webs.

Really do my best.

We dumped our gear and put on more bug spray.

Implicitly agreeing to stay away from shamans and spiders, we explored the farm a bit, the model companionably joining us while waiting for her bus to come, looking like some sort of beautiful elf crouched beneath the trees in a shaft of sunlight. Julia delayed our official introduction to her plantation, waiting and waiting for the bus to come, but as the sun sank lower and lower,  she decided to begin showing us her farm. We had already gotten the idea that she was the brains behind the operation and that Juan was more than happy in his secondary role.

Laura joined us, obviously feeling much better and began translating, to our great relief. Mike can order food quite well, and I kind of muddle thorough, but we were going to be talking about pruning and grafting trees and soil drainage.

close-up, banana leaf

After the spider information Julia sternly warned us not to touch any tiny caterpillars that we might see.

Spiders are fine, but for God's sake, beware the miniscule caterpillars?

The tiny caterpillars, Julia told us through Laura, should you touch one, it will stab you with venomous spines that will send an agonising, burning, electric shock sort of pain from your fingertip up to your armpit and will continue to cause you pain and swelling and can even make you sick...

Right. Don't touch those.

Welcome to the Amazon, where the spiders are ginormous and the caterpillars, well, I thought perhaps Julia might have been exaggerating, so I looked them up when we got home. She had actually been rather moderate in her warnings: they are responsible for a few deaths each year.

Death by caterpillar? Caterpillar?

Islands in the Sun

Nassau, Bahamas

Pardon my blogging absence. We were in the Caribbean. Vacation. You understand, I'm sure.

But now the sunburns are fading and we're back to real life. Mostly.

Half-Moon Cay, Bahamas

Stingrays. Very cool!

Grand Turk

Lastly, a familiar sight: the Atlantis...but this time, Bahamas version instead of Dubai. I kept a sharp lookout for Daniel Craig. No such luck.

Well, one can't have everything.



So high, so high, I've climbed the mountains of the sky...

The next morning, another supposed-to be-early start. We'd waited a good while in the hotel reception area for our translator, whom we'd never met, Mike pacing, irritated while I was more blasé about it, assuming it was a Peruvian time sort of thing. Most nationalities aren't as time-centric as we are, after all.

After half an hour I sent an email and made a phone call, but it was too early in the day for either of those to have done any good, as we both knew full well. I did it anyway to placate him a bit.

I can't speak for Mike, but I was still smarting over our inadvertent bad behavior from the night before and was determined to be the most pleasant, culturally with-it white girl in town, to maybe restore some karma, spread some good will.

When our translator finally made it, we were surprised to shake hands with a petite blond German girl who introduced herself as  Laura. She was quite angry we'd been told the wrong time, and apologised that we'd waited. We told her never mind; to my mind, if you think everything is going to go smoothly on vacation, you should probably stay home. More predictable.

Bundled into the taxi, we were off to the bus waiting area

which wasn't a station, by any means, simply a place where dusty vehicles gathered, a bit battered, some with tires barer of tread than one might like. As I understood it, each driver arranged fares and destinations, either ahead of time or on the spot, then set off without further ado as soon as they had enough passengers to fill the two or three rows of seats, up to 8 people and the driver, more if there were kids in laps.

Chickens scuttled and clucked underfoot, stray dogs watched warily, vendors offered eggs.

Speaking of predictable, I had foolishly thought there would be a restroom; we knew the buses were too small to have them, and we were going to be on the road for hours and hours. Laura asked if it was an emergency -should she ask the bus drivers and the passengers to wait for me? I decided that would not be along the lines of my dictum to be culturally sensitive, that I would deal with it until the petrol station stop, which, she assured me, was not too long up the road.

Mike and I were settled in the middle row of the bus, Laura in the front next to the driver. Almost immediately she dropped off to sleep, her head lolling this way and that.

My spouse and I exchanged glances; for a translator, she surely didn't talk much and it would have been nice to have someone telling us about the lands we were passing through. Oh well, we thought.

The little bus had set off at good speed, climbing up and soon we were once again traversing the farmlands and rolling hills of the Sacred Valley, heading toward the Andes Mountains. In the third row behind us, two of the passengers were lustily singing with vigorous young male voices to Spanish pop songs whenever one came on that that they favored, which was often enough.

I suppose this would be a good time to explain what the heck we were doing on that little bus.

We were going to spend the night at an organic coffee, cacao and tea plantation in Huayopata on the edge of the Amazon jungle.

Was I stoked? Indescribably so.

At the petrol station  one of the young men in the last row bought an enormous plate of food and the singing petered out for awhile as they feasted with their plastic forks on some sort of spiced meat and potatoes. Then the singing began again. Festive.

Eventually the radio died as we climbed up into the mountains, to be replaced with an MP3 player, an occasional 80's song from the States,  and winding curves. The mountains were closer now. Our driver took it as a personal affront if anyone dared drive in front of us and aggressively passed each and all, heedless of the road or speed, and took corners as though we were being pursued by the hounds of hell.

Laura was either listlessly propped against his shoulder or whipped around like a rag doll while I happily discovered that I could hold onto the center console seat with right hand if we were swooping left and with my left when we careened right and keep my seat relatively well.

Suddenly Laura sat straight up and said something in rapid fire to the driver, her mouth behind her cupped hands. He screeched to a halt in the middle of the road, steep precipice dropping into nothingness to one side, cliff to the other, and blind corners in front and behind us. Everyone except me bailed out to stretch their legs and most of them gathered to watch our guide throw up repeatedly into the street.

Once I realised what was happening I decided to stay in the bus; she didn't need an audience and I wanted a metal frame around me. No other vehicles appeared while we waited, and I thanked our lucky stars. Everyone got back in, Laura looking green and spent. "I have the flu," she said, "I took pills, and I thought I would be better, but..."

Oh, marvelous.

Happily, she fell back asleep, apparently a bit better. I was torn between feeling terrible for her and wondering how we could avoid getting sick in this petri dish of a bus.

As we got higher it got colder, and damper, rocks frequently strewn across the road, the road slipping and winding enough to give me a shoulder workout as I continued to grab the seat in front of me, remaining calm, if jostled. Mike was looking a bit concerned, and both of us were well aware that there are more "Bus/ Lorry In ______ (insert random third world country, like Peru,) Plunges Off Precipice Killing _____ (insert number here) Passengers and Driver" incidents than room in a daily paper to report them all, but while there may have been reason, there was no benefit to worrying about it at this point.

Plus, the roads could have been worse, and the tires could have been balder. We could have been riding on the roof.

This having been said, I think most people I know would either have been digging their fingernails into their palms or shoving fists in their mouths to have kept themselves from screaming.

This would be because most people apparently have a better grip of reality and mortality than I do.

Denial and ignorance can be a carefully cultivated and useful skill set.

The hills finally become mountains, and we crossed the Andes at snowy Abra Malaga Pass, 14,200 feet. About the same as Mt. Rainier. The cheerful young men in the back asked our driver to stop once again, and, surprisingly he agreed, so we all got out to look around and get some thin but blessedly fresh air.

Yes, I really love my llama hat. No, I don't care if it IS dorky.

Two boys were playing a game with a string and spool and the young South Americans from the back seat rushed over to say hello and take photos with them. You can see why.

The boys seemed shy, looking over at us now and then. I figured they'd seen their share of tourists; downhill-only cycling trips start from this pass, which, after looking at the steep and serpentine road seemed like a dumber than usual idea.

Church with carved doors (above).

Note how plain the seating area is, in contrast with the elaborate altar (below).

The journey continued, and yet, something as missing. Ah, the jolly guys in the back weren't singing any more. Perhaps they'd drifted off to sleep.

Or perhaps they had altitude sickness.

Half of people who journey to 14,000 feet, particularly a rapid ascent to that height, get altitude sickness in one form or another, most commonly headaches, but also nausea and vomiting, fatigue, or worse. Much worse, and it can strike as low as 8, 000 feet.

The  second guess was confirmed by sudden, violent vomiting sounds in the backseat from the larger of the two young men. We were having odd luck in our encounters with young men. Between the gurgling, the heaving, and the smell, the little bus was suddenly and inescapably a very unpleasant place to be. The driver rolled down his window, the only one that could roll down, which helped a little. A very little.

The vomiting continued. I couldn't believe that anyone could throw up that much, and wished, for his sake and ours, that he hadn't consumed such a large plate of food. I also started to worry about the bag capacity. To add to the good time we were having, Mike, next to me, was starting to gag, a sympathetic reflex that would do no one any good.

The woman on the other side of me dug in her bag and came up with cotton balls and a small bottle of isopropyl alcohol. She poured alcohol onto each cotton ball and passed them out to the passengers,  gesturing that we should hold them under our noses. Apparently she was old hat at this sort of thing, and we accepted them gratefully.

Would you believe they actually helped? The sharp astringency muted the sickening smell, though nothing could be done about the gruesome sound effects. We felt a bit better but he sounded really miserable.

Long miles later he was still heaving, and moaning, his eyes rolling back and his skin a sickening blue-gray color beneath the usual tan. We were getting more than a bit worried about him. Finally, and I don't remember why, the driver stopped the bus and the sick man's friend tried to help him up and out. He was literally too weak to stand and slumped to the floor, shaking so badly I thought he might have been having a seizure.

His forehead was burning hot to the touch, his breathing irregular and shallow, perspiration standing out in beads on his forehead as I tried to locate a pulse, which, when I finally found it, was thready, alarmingly rapid and weak.

We thought then that he was going to die. I put my cold hands on his face and neck and sent an informal, heartfelt little prayer to the universe for him.

the sign says place of haze

The bus driver, with what at the time seemed like shocking callousness, ordered us all back into the bus and took off down the mountain as soon as the doors were shut.

I wrenched around in my seat to encouraged the friend who was, by this time, beside himself with worry, to remove his friend's heavy coat and loosen his clothing, reducing the heat that would have made him feel lousy even under regular circumstances. Somehow the friend understood my English and crappy attempts at Spanish and got it done as we hurtled along the increasingly bad roads.

Laura told us later that she'd laid into the driver for being so uncaring. He told her, without apology, that he'd had a passenger, a woman ("sitting in the same seat as you are now!")  with babe in arms on another trip over these mountains, and the mother had gotten quite ill.

How ill? She died. And left him with a nameless corpse and a baby to deal with.

He was none too pleased to be landed in such a situation and knew that the only thing we could do to help the young man was to descend from altitude as quickly as possible, to stop fussing and fluttering so uselessly and get the hell out of there.

We careened down the mountain, around switchbacks and onto gravel and dirt and sections of pavement. Water flowed down over the road at regular intervals; apparently there was a river running straight down the mountain, whereas we had to loop back and forth, following the roads. 

Construction workers had started work to redirect it through pipes, but for most of the journey it sprayed up over the sides of the bus as we sped heedlessly through again and again, to no ill effect.



Looking around, the jungle was making its presence felt once more. The trees rose and thickened the further down the mountain we came. Also, the moaning in the backseat had stopped. I was afraid to turn around to look, but you'll be happy to hear that the descent had done miracles for our friend. He looked tired and worn, and his color wasn't what it had been before, but he managed a wan smile and you could tell, after all that, he was going to be fine.

In fact, by the time the now-filthy little bus dumped us off at the plantation, he was nearly as perky as before and gave us a hearty wave and ¡adiós!

Me? I needed a cup of coffee. Badly.

Which worked out well, since we were guests of a coffee plantation...