MUNGO EATS Latin America

We are in coffee country.  It is amazing, when you look around, all you see are millions and millions of coffee plants.

   We are staying at a coffee plantation, Hacienda Guayabal.  Quite a number of the plantations have started catering to tourists, and you can find a wide range of accommodations on the different plantations.  We are staying in the casa campesino, not the main  house.  We have the house all to ourselves, and it consists of 6 bedrooms,  a living room, a dining room and a kitchen.  We were going to stay  for 2 nights, but I think we will try to extend this to 3 nights. 

The house we are staying in is attached to a home that some of the workers on the farm  live in.  There are 3 children next door, and Sara and Sean are pretty happy to have new people to play with.  There is a pool up at the main house, and we were going to go swimming today, but I couldn’t drag the kids away from their new friends.  The kids spent the afternoon making paper airplanes, and cranes and making balloon animals, which quickly degraded into making water balloons.  It is nice to see them having fun. 

Kevin and I had a tour of the farm, where we learned about coffee again.  They do things slightly different in Colombia. They use an oven to dry their beans, instead of the sun, and they don’t hand sort the beans at all.  They grow only Colombian coffee in Colombia, which is a hybrid developed especially for this part of the world.

   It does not require shade to grow.  It sure makes a nice cup of coffee.  The sad thing is that all the “good” coffee is exported and the people of Colombia actually drink really, really crappy coffee made from all the reject beans that can’t be exported.  All the diseased beans are locally consumed. 

Tomorrow Kevin and I will venture into a nearby city to restock the very low supply of groceries left in the van.  I think we will let the kids hang out with their new found friends.  You never know when they will get to meet more kids, might as well let them enjoy them when they find them.