A Trip to Coffee Country
Sabado, 2 de Febrero, 2002
What an amazing, educational day with Bob Howell and Vicky Flores. After desayuno (eggs scrambled with chopped green beans, chilequiles, papaya and orange juice, plus Bob’s superb coffee) we packed swimsuits, towels, lunch and cameras and piled into their Jeep for a trip up into the mountains to some coffee plantations, with a trip afterwards to the hot springs at Jamurca to wash off the dust (and there was plenty to wash off).
The Jeep is part of the experience — nobody uses seatbelts, and at the beginning Vicky announced that the men ride in front and “the ladies atras (behind)!” We putt along Mex. 200 while faster traffic zooms around us — the people from the big cities who drive faster than the locals. We have been guilty of this driving behavior as well, we’re sorry to say.
We now have a much greater appreciation of coffee production than ever before, especially since we found out that the peones who pick the ripe beans receive only ONE peso (about 11 cents) per KILO (2.2 pounds) of raw beans. All four of us were shocked to learn that. The coffee grows on very steep slopes and each bean must be picked by hand and then carried to the waiting mule to be transported to where it is first processed. There is a lot of hand processing in the production of coffee, which we were to see later in the day.
This is arabica coffee, which grows at altitudes over about 500 meters, instead of the lower-altitude robusta variety, which is less desirable. Given what we pay for high-quality coffee in the US it’s despicable that there is such poverty at the beginning of the production chain. We later learned that in places the robusta wasn’t even being picked because the prices are so low.
We turned off Mex. 200 at the sign for El Capomo, along a very dusty road and found that today was their fiesta. The town was gathering for the parade — young women dressed as “banditas,” a small band of children in immaculate white uniforms with dark braid with their uniforms (mostly horns and a lot of drums), women with religious banners, a few floats in the beds of pickups. The parade was to end at la plaza in front of the church, where chairs (each with the word “Sol” — a Mexican beer — on the back) had been set up under a canopy with an altar for Mass. There was a wooden tower made from lathe tied up with string built around a metal pole, which would have fireworks attached that would make it rotate later this evening. Bob said that later that evening they would also have “the running of the bull,” during which a man with a fabricated bulls’ head covered with fireworks would run through the crowd. Very dangerous to everyone, especially the guy under the head! We were not planning to stay, but we would have loved to see that.
Behind the church the plaza had lovely rose bushes, which we see all over Mexico — very fragrant, large blossoms (4-5” across), the way roses used to be before they were so heavily hybridized. We took a photo of three blue doors in a white wall with a small green plastic soda bottle in the foreground for a touch of contrasting color. We also grabbed a shot of the roses with an older couple, sitting quietly on the edge of one of the planting beds under a tree, waiting for the festivities to begin.
Then we were off again on the road to Mamey El Grande Arriba, a much smaller town and pretty much the end of any kind of services. The town was empty, either because the men were working or everyone was at the fiesta in El Capomo.
We drove up a fairly rough, quite narrow road that under normal circumstances, without Bob and Vicky’s knowledge of the area, we’d never consider taking. It was not much wider than the Jeep, very rocky, and looked as if it was about to end in the middle of a field. Instead it was the main “road” to El Guayabal. We drove through the jungle, surrounded by tall palms, strangler vines and trees full of bromeliads just beginning to bloom, with Vicky singing “Cielito Lindo” and “Alla en El Rancho Grande” from the back seat.
We gained altitude very rapidly to about 700 meters, which we were reading off Mark’s GPS. (At the beginning of the trip Vicky was dubious about the GPS, but by the end she was convinced that Bob had to have one so they could track their explorations.) As we got higher the palms, vines and banana trees began to disappear and we started to see coffee trees along the road. Bob and Vicky had been there several times before, and we stopped often so she could give candy to the children and bags of basic foodstuffs to some of the families. Each bag had a kilo each of beans, rice, sugar and a package of cookies.
The coffee tree can grow to as much as 30 feet, but the growers keep it much shorter so it can be picked without ladders. Most of the trees are no taller than 10 or 12 feet, and the beans grow thickly along the branches. The road was lined with coffee trees and on the way home we encountered a group of pickers bringing in bags of beans on their mules. One mule was young and frightened of the Jeep and had to be persuaded to pass it, which it did by staying as far away as possible on the narrow road.
We topped out at the rancho of Don Clemente Inda, which the map identifies as El Guayabal. Bob and Vicky once met him in Mazatán, the town on the other side of the mountains where most of the coffee is collected before being taken for processing. He and his wife and a young woman (either a relative or a household servant) were sitting outside the house and got up to greet us. We discussed his coffee, which looked quite good, how it was produced and processed, and how Bob could get the necessary permits to export green coffee beans to the US. He has 80 hectares (about 200 acres) of coffee ground and is apparently a wealthy man by local standards, though it was not obvious at first from the house. His wife was wearing some expensive-looking gold jewelry set with stones and cameos, which we did not see anywhere else that day. We found out later from Vicky that he is 88 years old. Close-cut white hair, glasses, smooth skin, hardy-looking — clearly life in coffee country agrees with him.
After having the coffee fruit’s outer fleshy shell removed (by floatation in water and processing through a gas-powered machine with rotating disk plates that remove most of the skin), the two seeds in each fruit body are laid out to dry on concrete pads. Long rows of these seeds – the coffee beans – are raked and turned several times a day with a wooden paddle attached to a long handle. The concrete drying pads are quite large, covered with windrows of tan beans. Some still have a dark brown outer husk attached, giving them a salt-and-pepper appearance. Other pads are almost pure tan – why some have the dark husk and others don’t is unclear.
Don Clemente’s coffee is of very high quality — no insect damage, uniformly dry with very few dark husks remaining. Bob, who is a coffee connoisseur and roasts his own green beans, bought 3 kilos to bring home to try. It still has the second inner husk remaining, so there would be one more processing step before it would be suitable for roasting. Don Clemente explained to us how to judge quality — the inner husk should look golden (del oro) and not brown or green. Nancy was able to follow the conversation surprisingly well, mostly because Don Clemente spoke slowly and with the authority of age and wealth.
He also told us that the price of coffee is depressed and that the government buys most of it to produce the universally-despised instant coffee. We’ve heard that drug production farther north in Nayarit is displacing coffee because of the low prices, which is a dangerous local development.
As we left, Vicky gave candy to the little kids hanging around outside a shack nearby. They were Huicholes, she said, one of the local indigenous groups in the area.
We stopped a few more times to deliver parcels to families, and left the last one with an old man who lives alone and produces coffee. He’s 82 and his family lives in Compostela but he prefers to stay alone in the mountains. His coffee didn’t look as good as Don Clemente’s, but then he does it all himself. Vicky gave Nancy the parcel to present to him and she made the mistake of trying to give it to him before the handshake and greeting. There are certain protocols of introduction that we gringos sometimes overlook but are really quite simple to observe.
We bounced down the road to the hot springs where we changed into swimsuits and washed off the dust. (At one point Nancy looked down at her clothes, which were covered with very fine tan dust, about the consistency of cornstarch, and Vicky said she was now “a real Mexican woman!”) Very lovely warm water — no odor — in a large concrete pool. The water comes in close to 140 degrees F. with pretty large volume. We splashed around a bit and then had sandwiches and drinks — ham and cheese on wheat bread and Bob’s excellent homemade dill pickles. He grows his own dill here and cans his own pickles because he can’t buy them locally. Then out to the highway at La Cuata and home.
We are both still a little stunned at the poverty we saw today. Not much more than 10 miles off a major highway — as the crow flies — you’re in a world of dirt floors, tiny shacks, naked children, no running water, where there’s not even enough money for beans. Most of these people eat only tortillas with a little chile sauce, so Vicky’s CARE packages are precious gifts. The beans and rice are a good gift in themselves but the sugar is priceless. Vicky is a wonderful, very generous and kind woman. In the future we’ll know at least to bring candy for the kids any time we get off the highway.
Without the interpretation and experience Bob and Vicky bring to expeditions like this one would only see squalor and abject poverty without the underlying humanity. Poverty is universal — only the language changes with location — and there will always be children who enjoy a little bit of something sweet in their lives. As we all do.
Our hot showers at the end of the day seemed more luxurious than ever before. We’ll never take a cup of coffee for granted again.
Nancy Vickery
Mark Emmer
Salida, Colorado USA
