Vickery and Emmer 01

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.