I wish I could. Our lovely fresh smelling bag of colombian coffee was one of the few casualties of our trip - it has officially gone awol. My suspicion is it never made it past Dominica as we manically packed from one ferry to the other.
So all that remains is the memory. And of course the pictures. I have to say I was rather pleasantly surprised to see where at least some of our coffee comes from. It did not destroy my romantic idea of a tropical idyll with bananas everywhere.
We visited the local finca, on a walk from Salento, a small town in Colombia's enticingly called Zona Cafetera, which was a great place to spend a couple of days. For one, it was the only place in Colombia where we actually had good coffee (shocking I know, but insipid beans and UHT milk dont really do it for me). With the added bonus, of course, that we also tried the coffee on the farm where it's grown, picked, dried, roasted and brewed. Most of it only makes it to the drying stage and is then shipped off to big processing plants from where it's exported as generic Colombian arabica beans (with organic certification, Rainforest Alliance blessing and all). But the small finca we visited also kept some that was finished on the premises and their last small bag for the season was sold to us and we idiotically lost it somewhere...:( I think this deserves an ouf*!
*see What is to come entry below for an explanation
Secretly though the real reason I loved Salento is because it offered me a very sweet victory in the game of tejo. You can click for the wikipedia entry - what that doesn't describe though is the absolute joy and glory of actually hitting that little triangle of gunpowder that's sitting in the clay and causing a small explosion - TWICE in one night. I wouldn't normally gloat but the fact that my partner in crime and the people playing next to us failed to do this doubled my satisfaction and left me with a warm glow inside and a sense that perhaps, perhaps I'm not such a useless klutz after all...
We visited the local finca, on a walk from Salento, a small town in Colombia's enticingly called Zona Cafetera, which was a great place to spend a couple of days. For one, it was the only place in Colombia where we actually had good coffee (shocking I know, but insipid beans and UHT milk dont really do it for me). With the added bonus, of course, that we also tried the coffee on the farm where it's grown, picked, dried, roasted and brewed. Most of it only makes it to the drying stage and is then shipped off to big processing plants from where it's exported as generic Colombian arabica beans (with organic certification, Rainforest Alliance blessing and all). But the small finca we visited also kept some that was finished on the premises and their last small bag for the season was sold to us and we idiotically lost it somewhere...:( I think this deserves an ouf*!
*see What is to come entry below for an explanation
Secretly though the real reason I loved Salento is because it offered me a very sweet victory in the game of tejo. You can click for the wikipedia entry - what that doesn't describe though is the absolute joy and glory of actually hitting that little triangle of gunpowder that's sitting in the clay and causing a small explosion - TWICE in one night. I wouldn't normally gloat but the fact that my partner in crime and the people playing next to us failed to do this doubled my satisfaction and left me with a warm glow inside and a sense that perhaps, perhaps I'm not such a useless klutz after all...
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