While we wait for our packages to arrive at La Bonanza campground near Popayan we’re taking a couple of weeks to tour central Colombia’s coffee country.
It’s rainy and damp and full of insects, the biting kind and the merely irritating in your face kind so I’m not sure how this cultural encounter and chocolate tour is going to go this Tuesday, but the countryside sure is pretty.
When I was eleven a fellow student invited me to visit his family in Assam a region of northeast India bordering China and Burma where vast quantities of tea are grown, and indeed Simon’s father was a tea planter in proper ex-colonial style. We lived amidst tea plantations with servants and there in the pool I learned to swim, my great achievement of 1969 while men landed on the moon that July.
I mention this slice of my childhood because these rows of coffee bushes spreading symmetrically across the hillsides carry me back to the distant hills of Assam and the miles and miles of tea bushes dotted with palms and the colorful saris of the women tea pickers with baskets on their backs.
The other thing I ponder is the question, often brought up, of who figured out coffee making and how did that person come to the conclusion that these bitter tough green berries could ever be forced to conform to our idea of a delicious roasted nut worthy of roasting, crushing , straining and drinking.
There are bananas growing here too though their path to our taste buds is a lot easier to understand. Today we discover how unappetizing chocolate pods become the stuff most of us like a great deal.
I’ve seen commercial banana plantations all over the place, the Far East and the Caribbean islands I’ve sailed around and they all wrap their fruit in plastic bags apparently to make them ripen faster.
I forgot to apply insect repellent and lacking Rusty’s coat I was photographing walking and scratching my legs like a one man band.
I had to retreat to GANNET2 for relief and a cup of tea.
Rusty loves eating grass and for a while the two aggravating farm puppies hadn’t noticed us wandering. When we arrived they asked us if he is aggressive (“bravo”) worried he would attack their four month old puppies. Of course it was the out of control puppies that descended on him driving him under the van. I sprayed them with the water/vinegar mixture that we use to wash plates and they barely noticed. I don’t think this is a place we can stay for any length of time.
In Mexico and Central America bending down to pick up a stone frightens off street dogs as locals throw them hard and to hurt but in Colombia people love and feed their dogs and don’t throw stones so such gestures aren’t understood by the dogs! I have resorted to the vinegar spray which usually works to protect Rusty. Not here…They aren’t vicious but the puppies crowd him and bark at him and as restrained as Rusty is, it’s no fun for him.
So we will do our tour and move on. Yesterday we tried the chocolate they make here and it was delicious with no sugar added. Of course they pride themselves at Cinco Cacao on being organic and everything.
Sadly for a milk chocolate lover like me the best they can do is 60% cacao but I am resigned to having the palate of a barbarian.
A lovely spot outside Armenia, Colombia.
