I love coffee. I used to drink coffee to keep me awake during 24-hour halibut fishing openers in Kodiak. I has a skipper on my crab boat that brought a 50lb bag of Espresso beans on the boat and would make the crew freshly ground super strong coffee BEFORE he woke us up every day. I really came to love coffee shortly after I met Michelle. I was at her cabin on Goldhill Road one night and she made me coffee with vanilla ice cream in it. It changed my life.
I prefer my coffee in a large cup with a teaspoon and a half of sugar and Coffeemate (TM). Many people have suggested cream or half and half to me, like I’m missing out on something. I have to say here that Coffeemate (TM), for me, adds a wonderfully delicious flavor to my sweetened coffee that I totally enjoy. No other non-dairy creamer adds the same flavor as Coffeemate (TM), nor does cream, etc. Just to be clear.
Michelle and I have been drinking hazelnut coffee for as long as I can remember. It used to be that the only place in Fairbanks you could get it was at Country Kitchen, but as the coffee movement in the USA grew, it became more widely available. At some point we switched from fresh ground coffee to Folgers hazelnut coffee. With six kids, you do what you can to save money.
Coffee availability in SA was a big concern for us. Mary and Brian had been to Ecuador not too long before we were heading there and told us there was no good coffee in Ecuador. This was pretty horrifying What about the rest of SA? We were going to Colombia so thing should be pretty good, right? Just in case, we stocked up on Folgers in Florida before we shipped the camper over. I think we had like 8 cans of coffee. We also had a giant can of Coffeemate (TM).
In Colombia it turns out that most of the coffee there is for export. When I was picking up the van and trailer from the port I was in a warehouse filled with coffee. And I mean filled. One hundred pound burlap sacks stacked on pallets and then stacked on top of each other something like 40 feet high. It was all unroasted coffee beans. It reminded me of the warehouse they stuck the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was an unbelievable amount of coffee. Inconceivable really.
As we drove south all too quickly through Colombia we came to the city of Caucasia. We saw our first supermarket in SA and screeched to a halt on the side of the road to head in. We stocked up on many groceries, but one of the things we bought was a 5 kilo bag of ground coffee. It was something like $35. It turns out we should have bought more.
Our giant bag of coffee was pretty good stuff. I have to say, Colombian coffee is really good. We didn’t have any coffee worries at all through Ecuador. We didn’t run out until our lengthy stay in Puno. At the supermarket in Puno (Plaza Vea) they sold some coffee that turned out to be tolerable. Altiplano was the brand. It was pretty expensive, at least compared to the prices of other things in Peru, which were generally pretty cheap. It was about $7 a pound. One night we stopped into a smaller market that had coffee for sale in plastic bags. It smelled pretty good so we bought it. It was $5 for two pounds. It was terrible and still sits in the cupboard to this day.
We has a lot of hopes for Chile after spending two months in Peru. Good coffee was one of them. Oh well. So far we have tried four or five different brands of coffee in Chile. They were all OK, but Chile itself is pretty expensive and coffee is no exception. It runs $10 a pound for cheaper stuff (Haiti brand or Colombia brand) but quality coffee is way up there. Juan Valdez brand (REALLY!) from Colombia is $20 a pound. We have not bought it.
We have quite a bit of our Folgers hazelnut coffee left, but it turns out that we are not liking it so much. We ran out of Coffeemate (TM) a long, long time ago and it seems hazelnut Folgers is not the same without it. Especially black. Many of you who have been to our house may already have known this. We did not, since we had been adding stuff to our coffee. I don’t know what this means for us when we get home. Will we continue to drink strictly Folgers hazelnut? I don’t think so. I am looking forward to moving back to fresh ground coffees of many varieties . I am hoping to have a few or several different types of coffee on hand for whatever mood suites me. But first I must talk about an unforeseen development. NESCAFE!
The coffee aisles in supermarkets (or any market that has coffee) are filled with instant coffee. Seriously. There is something like 3 feet of shelf space for ground North American style coffee and then 25 feet of instant stuff. Ryan had brought some Nescafe from the US with us and we (Michelle and I) decided to try it. It turned out to be not so bad. Really. We followed the directions exactly to see what it would be like and it was pretty good! Best of all, it was really easy to make. Just heat up some water and pour it over the instant coffee in a cup. No need to get out the generator and the coffee maker, find the filters, measure out X amount of coffee, make sure we have enough water (always an issue in SA since any water we consume, we buy), etc. Most importantly, since we have all moved to black coffee (except for Ryan, who was already there), it tasted good. And we can make it quickly anytime anywhere, which can be pretty important when you’re traveling like we are.
Now I’m not saying we are switching to instant coffee on a permanent basis. I don’t really know what this means. I am still looking forward to stocking up on coffee as I mentioned earlier in this post. I am curious to see what happens when we get back. I can certainly see the advantages instant coffee can present when you need coffee pretty bad.
One thing I know, I sure do miss good coffee.
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Leaving the hotel in Cartagena was as complicated as we thought it would be. Mark had moved the van and camper to a parqueadero near the port, which was a half an hour cab ride away. He had to go get propane tanks and hook them up so we could run the fridge and the stove. He had to get mandatory Colombian car insurance. He had to take many cab rides on the back of the motorcycle taxis. We had to get the dogs. And we could not drive in the dark. By 4pm, the dogs, the kids, the bags and the propane tanks were at the parqueadaro. Mark noticed someone had stolen the camper license plate. We thought we might spend the night there and leave early the next morning but it became clear that we could not do that. The camper had been in the sun since it left Florida. The inside of the camper was 123 degrees. Even with all the windows open we could not be inside for more than a few minutes. The dogs were frantic – they had another cab ride (this time Trek rode on top) and they had been kenneled at a great vet office with a dog courtyard and other dogs but they were just literally freaking out. The heat did not help the dogs either. We had to move and get some air circulating into the camper and van and get the dogs and kids out of the sun. So we piled in and plunged into the Cartagena traffic. We are following the Pan American highway the entire time. All we had to do was find another parqueadero before dark. A parqueadero is a lot where you pay a small fee to park overnight and it has a guard that keeps an eye on your vehicle and sometimes services. Parqueaderos are everywhere.
The drive was fine. The van cooled down and the dogs relaxed and all was going well. Until it appeared the road had divided and we might be going the wrong way down a one way road so Mark pulled into a gas station and we realized we were right on course so he had to go around the block to turn around. Around the block was through a small town and it was a little tricky. Busses, cars, people, donkeys – and motorcycles are everywhere, literally tens of thousands of motorcycles weaving in and out of traffic. We drove through h the small town and at one point a buss passed us going in the other direction. At that exact moment, a motorcycle decided to try to pass us on the left and squeeze between the bus and our vehicle. It did not work. The motorcycle got stuck. No one could move – the bus, the motorcycle and Team DeCorso were frozen there and people were yelling and gathering and then there was a loud THUNK (did someone hit the camper?) and the motorcycle was free and we could all move. We moved about 100 feet and we came to where we had to turn left. A policeman was standing there with a whistle and he stopped the traffic so we could make our turn – and then noticed we had a crack in the windshield. We turned, he pulled us over and began explaining how we needed to get the windshield fixed. Right then. Except it was Friday at 5pm so we would need to stop driving immediately and get a hotel for the next three days. He had Mark’s passport, driver’s license and vehicle paperwork. The van, he said, was immobilized. It was 93 degrees and the sun was setting. A hotel meant the dogs would go where? How would this work? So I resorted to a lesson learned in the classic book A People’s Guide to Mexico. I begged him. And it worked!! He smiled and gave Mark back his passport, wished us a merry Christmas and waved us on.
But now it was nearly dark and we were nowhere near the parqueadaro. We drove on, nervously, because YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO DRIVE IN COLOMBIA IN THE DARK!
The next town we came to was Arjona and it had a gas station so Mark pulled in but it was closed and we couldn’t get in and we couldn’t turn around so we had to head down the narrow the road until we could go around the block. The road where we could turn had a metal blockade at it and we were stuck. The only option was to back up about a mile through the donkeys and motorcycles and children. We were near a little store and a man there came to check us out and he said he knew a place where we could park overnight, we could follow him. A bunch of guys moved the metal blockade and we headed off following the guy on a motorcycle. He took us to a field ringed with small houses and told us to park. Then he went and told some people in a house that we were staying. He asked for 5000 pesos, about $2.75, and he left.
We got out. It was even hotter here than in Cartagena. The air was so thick with moisture we could almost not breathe. The camper had cooled down to about 100 degrees and we had to make dinner. We had some food in the cupboard but the fridge had not cooled down yet so we made some pasta. We sat in the camper, sweating and hot and feeling kind of overwhelmed and down. Our license plate was stolen. We had a motorcycle stuck on us. We had gotten stuck twice. The police had nearly immobilized the van. And we had not even gone 35 miles. It was suffocatingly hot and we were just literally dripping with sweat.
We needed water (sold in bags here) so Mark and Jack headed off to find water and returned to tell us that there were a bunch of kids outside. I peeked out and there were about 20 kids looking at me. So naturally I asked them if they wanted to come inside. And of course they did. And then their parents came over and came inside. We talked and they said there was a man in the town that spoke English so they dispersed some children to get him. He came over and we all began to talk. It was clear we were about to eat so the English-speaking man, whose name was Hilo, said we should finish eating and then come outside and sit in a circle with them. We agreed. As we finished our pasta, we could see them bringing chairs and chairs over and setting up a circle 2 feet from our door. We went outside and there were more than 50 people smiling at us. They had brought eight chairs for us. We sat down. And then the best Solstice Party ever began. They brought us gifts and snacks, using English / Spanish phrase books to ask us how to say things. Jack and Ryan were flanked by girls each. Girls were putting earrings on Jennah. Laptops appeared with Google Translate and Facebook. We tried to ask if avocados grew there – we had seen these gigantic ones in Cartagena. The word for avocado did not translate with the phrase book or Google Translate and in the process they brought us a bunch of exotic fruit we had never even heard of. One had skin like an avocado but was hollow inside except for a blob of jelly with some seeds and it was delicious! Tangy and sweet. There were berries with hard skins and seeds that Sylvia loved. And then at one point, we had a group realization about avocados and it was a beautiful moment. They gave Sylvia a teddy bear and at one point Annabelle asked for the Spanish word for tag and when she learned it, all the kids took off to play. Annabelle and Sylvia went off to play inside a house. Several times, the girls began chanting beso (kiss).
Many, many photos were taken. We had 59 people inside the camper. They asked us to stay for Christmas. Many times. We stayed up until midnight. One woman wanted to make us breakfast and we tried to decline because we did not have any breakfast food to offer at all. The woman who made us breakfast gave us 15 beautiful peacock feathers.
We woke up in the morning and one of our new friends brought us a pot of strong, sweet coffee. Then they brought us to see a toucan!
We headed to a house where they presented us with the best breakfast I have ever had – bacon that was thick and tasty, bollos, fresh homemade cheese, a HUGE amount of the best guacamole ever and fresh ice cold juice made from the sweet & tart unknown fruit. After breakfast, Hilo cut Ryan’s hair. Hilo was a really neat and interesting person. He had learned to speak English himself, some from American music. He was a hair stylist and he did a great job on Ryan’s hair.
We wished we had some things to give them because we had been given so much from the people of the town. We had been kind of bummed and feeling like maybe the trip was a mistake and the people of Arjona completely turned our day around. We didn’t have very much with us, most of the stuff we had was not so cool (like spoons) but I dropped a penny on the ground and the kids were amazed at the penny so we handed out a bunch of American change and there was a lot of explaining what the English word was and how many pesos each coin was worth. We were able to fill up our water tank from someone’s house. We left to a waving crowd of people. It is impossible to describe how wonderful our short stay in Arjono was. This had truly been one of the most amazing experiences of our lives!
