baileybrent

The nice part of this story is that I was able to successfully navigate two government buildings and a few hours of beauracracy entirely in Spanish. Something I didn´t know I would be cable of and was proud to have pulled off on my own.

The sad part of this story is that I had to do all of that in order to get a police report for the theft of my laptop.

I had been riding a night bus from Peru up the coast in Ecuador. I had been warned how ofter thefts happen on that bus and had been very careful with my belongings. But then when I transfered to an early morning bus within Ecuador I wasn´t as careful. And I paid the price for that. I snoozed a little bit too much and when I woke up someone had gotten into my small backpack (which had been at my feet the entire time) and slipped out my laptop. I didn´t lose any photos, because I still have my cameras and memory cards. But I did lose a lot of work I had done on many of those photos, and some long blog posts I had been writing. The computer should be covered by my insurance, but the deductable is still a lot of money, and I won´t have a laptop with me for the rest of the trip. So uploading more photos is going to have to wait until I get home. I will still post a few blog entries, using either photos that have already been uploaded or not using photos at all. But a lot of my blog entries will be on hold until late June.
I was pretty pissed about this for a whole day. But at the moment I´m in a nice beach town taking Spanish and surfing classes. So it´s hard to stay mad.

There was a surprisingly strong entry into the empanada competition from Manizales. I just wandered into a spot that looked like a chain restaurant on the nightlife strip and wasn’t expecting much. But it was nice blend of beef, beans, and potato. And, like almost all the empanadas in Colombia, it was deep fried. Not the healthiest, but pretty tasty.

I finally got my proper tour of a coffee finca in Colombia’s coffee growing region, or “Zona Cafeteria.” It was interesting to learn about the farming process, and the hike around the plantation was beautiful. Coffee, I’m told, lends itself well to small scale farming, and so this region of Colombia is covered with small, independently owned farms. Sort of like a “wine country” for coffee.

This is the waiting room where coffee collectors sit and wait for their harvest to be weighted.

A farm fresh cup of coffee.