Pictures and coffee

So, everyone, I am going to be selective in the pictures that I post, only because I want there to be some reason for everyone to see me when I get back. : ) I'm trying to pick out my favorites, but it is very difficult. Enjoy!

These first ones are from the crater trip.

The higher up the side of the crater we got, the foggier it got. We were going really fast, so trees would just loom up through the mist and then disappear back into it. It wasn't really eerie, but it did lend a certain amount of atmosphere, especially because the trees just look different in Africa.

Here is Ngorongoro Crater. It was cloudy during the morning but brightened up during the afternoon.

Did you know that wildebeasts moo like cows do? I have a few pictures of them up close, too, and they are surprisingly ugly creatures. Yet, like good little wildebeasts, they cross the road in one straight line.

Lions! They looked so comfortable in that bracken that I wanted to go curl up with them. The fact that they could eat my head in one bite stopped me.

I'll say a little about the coffee farm tour as well. We were picked up in a group around 9:00, then drove maybe a half hour to Nkoaranga, a small village in the mountains. Our tour guide, Justin, met us there and showed us around the orphanage, secondary school, town (which we had to walk through) and then took us to the coffee farm. This coffee farm is organic, cooperative, and fair trade, and we met the owner of the farm, who is 72 and still amazingly spry. The owner showed us how they graft plants, then showed us the coffee bushes (trees?) themselves. I had no idea that coffee beans grew on trees, in clusters, and can be picked only when red.


So they picked a bunch, then showed us the manual crank that they use to shell the beans.
They explained that after the beans are shelled, then have to be washed multiple times, dried in huge net trays, and then shelled again. Only after all of that are they sent to the coffee factory. We had a snack of bananas while we were there (RK took a picture: "my first African banana.") The walking-around part was really nice, because the countryside was amazing. I learned how to use the close-up setting on my camera, and I really had a blast taking pictures of flowers. You wouldn't believe how pretty the flowers are here--roses grow naturally all over the place, and there are about six different other types of flowers draped over trees and scattered through the shrubs. Very pretty.


After that part of the tour we went to the tour-owner's home for a huge lunch: we had platters of fresh mangos, papayas, pineapples, passionfruit, watermelon, and avocados, followed by a meal of goat stew with vegetables, chapati, rice, ugali, salad, greens, and plantains. Justin showed us the traditional way of eating ugali (a corn porridge type food) with our hands, and using it to scoop up vegetables and meat (it serves the same purpose as chapati does), but our host said it's very sticky and if you don't get it right you get it all over, so we decided to use our forks instead. Yes, I ate the goat. I knocked down some pretty high mental barriers in order to do it, but I didn't want to miss out on it since I was there and it was the main dish (I was hungry after tromping up and down mountains all morning!) The goat itself was OK, but the sauce and the vegetables were absolutely delicious. I ate more than I should have, but it was all very very good. Then we had waffles (our host is from Norway, and so slipped a little bit of that into our lunch!) with jam and honey, and a cup of local coffee for dessert. RK said it was the best coffee he had ever tasted. Not being a coffee connoisseur myself, I took his word for it--it was pretty good coffee.

After lunch we went to the coffee factory, which consisted of one room where the beans are roasted, ground, and packaged. Literally. Our host showed us the different settings for making the different kind of roasts and different types of grounds (french press, filter drip), and then showed us how she packages everything. When I said it's all in that room, it was all in that room: she buys huge rolls of plastic tubes, has a sealing machine that she uses to make the bags that the actual coffee is packaged in; she had bolts of fabric and a sewing machine to make the decorative bags, she hires people to sit outside and wind strings from banana leaves (which, of course, grow around her house) which she uses to tie up the bags, and then she attaches a tag with the date and the name of the farmer where the beans come from. All in one room. It's a pretty amazing operation, all around, and if it grows I think she would employ half the village. We each got a bag of coffee included in the trip price and then an opportunity to buy more--I think RK has more coffee in his bag than clothes, for the trip back. Then, around 5:00 ish, we were driven back home.