Coffee Farm

Where does your coffee come from? Not here. The stuff in these pics goes to Europe. In fact, this whole area has been funded by European countries--infrastructure, schools... etc. They tend have a longer-term, more sustainable view of coffee farming than Nescafe or Starbucks.

We toured this coffee farm in the Northern Highlands--very close to the Honduras border. It's near a town called Jalapa (pronounced Ha-la-pa). We rode 30 minutes on a bumpy road up out of the valley and into the hills. We were the only tourists around and it stretched Lisa's Spanish to the max to keep up with the quick-talking Nicaraguan farmer and his dad.

We toured around the property for the morning before the sun got too hot and learned a few tidbits about grass-roots coffee production. It's these types of sustainable coffee farms that we need to buy coffee from. Starbucks is not in these hills folks--the coffee from this place is expensive because it's sustainable.

After tasting the beans and taking a few pictures of the view, we were back in our strange little hotel for lunch. While this place was way off the beaten path, it was also extremely hard to travel comfortably in (at any price). There was no food to be had that wasn't deep fried and mass-produced (aside from plantains--which were still deep-fried, but at least local). The coffee berries were the tastiest thing we tried all day.

Not used to having requests for tours of their farms, the transport up and down was in a single passenger seat of a pickup truck whose window was stuck half down. The road was mega 4x with ruts that could swallow a Smartcar.