Coffee Plantation

Mural by the secondary school
Orphanage outside of Arusha
Coffee plants
I don't drink coffee, but I might change my mind now. My reasons for not drinking coffee before were mainly that I didn't like the taste, and also the caffeine would make me jittery while upsetting my stomach.

When I found out one of my apartment mates was going on a coffee tour, but that there was no more space for extra people, I got super excited when this other girl told me that there was extra space. I suppose it's reverse psychology, because when I actually thought about it, I'm not super interested in coffee, and I really just wanted to go because I thought I wouldn't be able to go. Anyhow, the tour turned out to be awesome, mainly because of the food.

First, we visited an orphanage, in which I wanted to adopt a bunch of babies. It is sad though, because so many women die in child labor that there are tiny infants in these orphanages. While the volunteers care for the babies, there are too many babies, and not enough volunteers. The baby that I was holding was sick actually, so I ended up getting sick the next day. My apartment mate held the same baby, and also got sick. Note also, that this happened before we went to Arusha National Park, even though I am posting about it later, so we ended up giving our cold to this other kid who was stuck in the vehicle with us for 6 hours.

Anyhow, after buying some rice and produce for the orphans we went to the coffee plantation. Granted, this was the part of the tour that I did not like, I found it kind of boring. Coffee grows on trees, and they look like berries. Inside the berry there is a white pit, which it the coffee bean. The wild coffee trees have a lot of slippery goo between the flesh of the berry and the pit, while the planted trees have less. The farmers grow organically because it is actually cheaper for them to do so--it is more time intensive, but they save money and get a larger yield. To keep bugs away, they plant something that smells very strong (like sage) around the plantation.

After the plantation, we ate an amazing lunch. The women who ran the tour is Norweigian, she moved to Tanzania because she came on a safari here and fell in love with her safari cook. Beate and Frank have two really pretty children, and they live in a very nice house, kind of like a mansion, close to the plantation. 90% of their buyers are from Norway, and they sell out of their coffee each year. At their house, we ate goat stew and Norweigian pancakes with the brown cheese that I love. Apparently she doesn't give everyone the cheese, she just brought it out for us because I told her that I visited Norway last year and I loved the cheese.

The factory, if you can actually call it a factory, is part of their house. It is actually just one machine. They roast the coffee, and then seal it in airtight plastic bags, and then put it in a cloth package to ship out. The coffee that they gave us to drink was roasted the day before, and it was the best coffee I have ever had. I normally would never drink coffee black, but this coffee was so aromatic and not bitter. It also didn't make me jittery or iritate my stomach. Beate says that real coffee connosoirs will throw out their beaks 2 weeks after they have been roasted, but most people can just drink the coffee within a year of the roasting date. I brought some beans back with me (we got a free bag of coffee beans with the tour), and plan to drink it. Although, that means I'd have to get a bean grinder and a coffee machine, so perhaps I'll just give it away as a gift. Alternatively, I could just get the grinder and the machine, and then just purchase more coffee.

The brand is called Wild Tracks, and they ship anywhere in the world. The price is 4500 shillings per bag, which is about 3 USD. I would highly recommend it.