La Escuela de la Montana part II

Other highlights from my week in the mountains.

I finally got pictures of the giant leaves I first talked about in my Fuentes Gorginas post. I think it's called the Elephant Ear Plant - quite appropriate. We went for a walk on one of the nearby coffee fincas (plantations) one morning and I got some shots of the various plants and run-down buildings. We learned all about the process of cultivating and harvesting coffee - it is time and labor intensive! My favorite part of the outing was that I was the translator (with the help of Troy who's Spanish is more advanced than mine, but who's attention span is a bit more mercurial). I felt pretty darn competent with my Spanish, recounting the story of the plantation for the group. This was the week when things started to click for me, I can now understand the vast majority of what folks say, and little by little my verbal expression is catching up.

View of the back section of the finca, which looks out over a ravine to another finca. Since the coffee crisis this finca has fallen into disrepair. They tried diversifying their crops with avocados and flowers, but neither has done very well.

This is a neat little plant that I totally forget the name of. If you stroke it's leaves, they gently close up, sort of like a butterfly closing it's wings. It's not carnivorous, but the action provides some sort of protection against predators (I think). The little white flecks are flecks of ash that were falling like snow from the nearby volcano that erupts every 40 min. or so

This is what coffee looks like fresh off the plant. The seed pods are bright red when ripe, and the seed inside is covered in a sticky sweet "miel" (honey). It's really tasty! The beans go through a series of steps to separate out the higher quality from the lower quality, de-casque the seed, and dry it in preparation for export.

This is the drying patio. It's a large area - think football field. Coffee beans take 2-3 days to dry in the sun. The harvest matches up with the dry season, so there's rarely rain to spoil the process

The other half of the drying patio where you can see the secador de cafe - or coffee dryer. It's the building with the rusting tower-like thing. That's what they use for higher volumes of beans and faster production times. Beans can dry in about 24 hours in the coffee dryer.

This was me trying to get a Dylan-worthy picture of old industrial structures.

This is part of the "big house" or the plantation owner's house. It's rather palatial and sits just above the coffee drying patio. No one lives here at the moment, the family visits about once a month to check on stuff, but spend most of their time at their other plantation close to Antigua where they run an ecotourism finca/hotel/business thing.

Depending on the type of coffee planted, coffee trees can have a production span of as little as 10 years (or as many as 40). The wood makes for a good building material and that's what this decorative patio enclosure is made out of.

I actually felt like I was in the tropics the week I was at the mountain school, mostly because of all the flowers and the green plants. This was on the front entryway of the big house on the plantation

In what I guess constitutes the front side-yard of the big house.

More decorative details in coffee wood. Looking at the gardening shed from the front entryway

I took this shot through the cracks in the window below. this is the front patio/front entryway through the main door of the big house.

Coffee wood decoration/window framing the main door of the house

Giant leaves!!!

Jorge, our guide, insisted on me taking a picture with him for scale. Seriously, giant leaves!

There are a bunch of insects at the mountain school - it's actually at a lower elevation than Xela and a bit closer to the coast so the climate is warmer, more humid, and rainy-er. Hence, more insects. We also had the fun of experiencing the results of a Pacific tropical storm - it just meant more rain, stronger rain, for longer periods of time during the day. After a few storms roll through during the season, though, the risk of landslides increases and there is a distinct possibility of the road through the mountains connecting Xela and Colomba getting washed out.

But I digress - insects! There were lots of them! I got some great photos of a monarch that fed on some of the flowers next to the front patio of school. There was one night when James, another student, came and found me to show me a giant moth that had landed on one of the bookcases in the library - it was pretty darn cool - and another day he had a giant grasshopper on the wall next to his bunk. It was so big that its mandibles actually posed a bite risk, which is nearly impossible with grasshoppers. I was in entomology heaven, although the downside was that there were also mosquitoes and no-see-ums, so I ended up with a handful of bites - nothing like James though, that kid's legs looked like the definition of smallpox. Those bites itched worse than anything, and the worst part was they were on a 12 hour delay. You'd see the bite during the day and it wouldn't start itching until the next morning - so you had all night to anticipate the ensuing misery. My favorite morning, though, was when I was surprised by a little colony of ants ... who took up residence in the zipper of my backpack. They were just chilling - larvae and all - in the crease under the flap that covers the zipper. It was zipped up, they didn't get into my clothes or anything, and it was straightforward enough to brush them off outside. I was just so surprised because they moved in literally within 18 hours. It was really rather impressive.

This was the view from the window of my room. Our classes took place in those hut-looking things. They have banana leaves for the roofs which have to be replaced every two years or so. It's hard to see from this picture, but there are these intensely purple flowers dotting the trees.

Monarch butterfly grabbing some nectar. There were lots of other butterflies too of all different shapes and colors, but none of them stood still long enough for a picture

Rather pleased with this shot, it was a good pose

I fell in love with these flowers. They were electric purple. Incredible.

These flowers poked up on sturdy green stalks coming out of the ground. The bloom is about the size of a grapefruit.

More of my favorite purple ones

These were little low-to-the-ground cover that bordered the front patio of school. I like the variegated leaves

I didn't stage this. There was one of the purple flower petals stuck to the trunk of the tree they grow on right at eye-level, and it just happens to resemble a heart.

In addition to the coffee finca hike, we also went to visit a nearby collective of ex-guerrilas for our longer Saturday outing. The community is called Santa Anita and is about 45 minutes from the school on the other side of Colomba - we did the trip in true local style: standing up in the back of a pick-up truck. It's an extremely common mode of transportation here and they modify the beds of the pickups with a psuedo-cage of support bars for folks to hold on to. If it rains, they throw a tarp over you. It's a ton of fun and, despite being the most dangerous mode of transportation I've taken, is by far my favorite way to see the countryside. I snapped some awesome pictures of the Santa Maria volcano while in motion.

The view from the back of the pick-up truck. It's a rather nice stretch of road between school and Colomba

Yes, I really snapped this from the back of a pick-up truck doing 50mph. Santa Maria almost always has that wisp of cloud as her crown. The little tiny mountain you see on her right slope is the one that erupts constantly and showered our first finca hike with ash.

Santa Maria volcano

The community of Santa Anita is made up of ex-guerrilas who fought against the dictator regimes during the armed-conflict. After the peace accords were signed in 1996, this group of ex-guerrilas found an abandoned coffee finca and worked for several years to earn the rights and the loan to buy it from the government. The documentary Voice of a Mountain tells the story of this community, which is really very impressive. They joined the armed conflict in part to fight for the rights of campaneros (countryside folk/farmers) and indigenous persons to own their own land to make a living off of. After the war they had a dream of a self-sustaining coffee collective that would allow the families of their community to make a living and provide an education for their children. It has been an uphill battle. From winning the rights and the loan for the land to cultivating a brand new coffee crop (it takes about 5 years minimum for coffee plants to mature enough to produce a sell-able harvest) to facing an economic crisis when the world coffee market crashed to providing potable water and education for their children. They have fought every step of the way for everything they have. Currently, they produce organic, free trade coffee and bananas (although a banana blight a few years ago has hampered that part of their operation). They also rent out their equipment and labor for processing coffee to smaller operations nearby, like the school. They're chipping away at the incredible amount of debt that they're in, but it's slow going.
We got an awesome tour of the community, the finca, and hiked down to the bottom of a ravine to see some really awesome waterfalls. In the early days of the community they used to have to manually haul their water up from the ravine because they had no plumbing and no other water source. It was enough for me to hike myself out, I couldn't imagine doing it with 5 gallons of water on my back. One of their first top priority projects was to build a rain-collecting water tower and a plumbing system to every house. It took them several years, but now every house has running water, 24/7 - a feat the community is very proud of.

Bananas!

This is from a look-out point built on the back side of the finca at Santa Anita. I'm not sure what mountain that is. The vista overlooked a ravine (we later walked down it in one corner) with a waterfall on the far side. We didn't hike to that waterfall, but we did get some pretty cool ones on our side. The far side was another finca.

This was the first waterfall we came to - I thought it was the only one we were going to see so I have a good half dozen shots of it. We could walk up and stand under it and after walking down a steep 1,000 foot drop or so with a fair amount of humidity, it felt awesome!

Looking down the ravine, you can sort of see how the walls of the canyon rise up around us. This is probably the rain-forest-y picture everyone thought of when I said I was going to Guatemala.

So I got a little picture happy with the waterfalls (I like waterfalls, and we passed 4ish), but this is by far my favorite.

Another shot of the same waterfall as above, but zoomed in on the top. It just looked really cool the way the water cascaded down this rock face.

Another gorgeous tropical flower. This one looks like a trumpet and hangs down, I crouched underneath to take this shot looking up into the bell. Right after this we came across a tree with a couple pairs of parrots, but they were so high up and so well camouflaged I didn't even bother taking a photo.

Another highlight from my week at the mountain school was the little puppy who showed up one day mid-week, and decided to adopt the school as her new home. This black and brown pup wandered into the kitchen one afternoon, sniffed around, and decided she liked the place. We all kept asking "who's dog is that?" but no one seemed to know. She curled up in a corner and took a nap - looking pretty ridiculously adorable. A while later the real school dogs returned - they usually spend their day wandering around the grounds, following people to meals, and napping. As they wandered into the kitchen the little pup woke up and immediately started making a riot to defend "her" territory. The (much older) school dogs gave her a look as though they couldn't even be bothered to teach her who the real boss was. She ended up hanging out for a few days until we found out which local family she belonged to. The Colorado high school group sort of adopted her...or maybe she adopted them, it wasn't really too clear. It just amused me to no end that she literally wandered in one day and decided to stay.