Well,here I was in Pangoa, Peru. Ma and Pa out meeting with farmers at the co-op building and I’m scared to use the bathroom in the hotel(Hotel Casa de Blanca).

Reason #1 I’m scared to use the bathroom: The hole in the wall. I was terrified that a big cockroach would come out and slowly eat me. #2: The sink moved last time I touched it. Not a little, it jumped at me, I think. And #3: there was no toilet seat. Now that had me a little confused. I’m radioing in to my sphincter (I had  some bad food and was slowly dying) ” Hey sphincter ,can we take another hit?” “Nope” it replies, ” The shields are failing”, and I’m scared of going to the bathroom. In the end, I went to the bathroom. (After the the shields went down I submitted to my bowels and overcame my fear, NOT REALLY), did not get attacked by bloodthirsty cockroaches, jumped by the sink, and managed to not fall into the toilet.

The Hotel Senorial, where we stayed in Lima, was a great place.We had great food, and the hotel had a big  outside area where we played with Sasha, Michael’s son, from Bean North. Walking on the streets of Lima was pretty cool. I saw lots of street stands and bought lots of Chiclet gum from them. It seems to be the  the only gum they have in Peru to the best of my knowledge, and it had a really cool taste, mint and a not good after taste and then a little bit of grape. We also had guinea pig to eat. They are like the size of my face, and they taste somewhat like chicken or rabbit. When going up over the pass to get to Pangoa, we all drank an immense amount of  coca tea which has no taste whatsoever.

When we stopped at the top to take a picture, Sasha fainted, and everybody else felt really light headed, so it was really weird. This was the first time I had been at over 15,000 ft. On the first night we got into Pangoa there was a big meal prepared by the people of the coop but I felt really bad. The ride coming in was supposed to take around 12 hours but it took

the bus an extra 5 hrs. to get over this really bumpy part of the road. After dinner we all crashed at the hotel. In the morning we all got up and got into the back of pickup trucks and drove out to a farm where we had a breakfast of eggs, fruit, avocado and the best rolls in the world. Then we checked out more farms, met with the farmers, had lunch (yes, more guinea pig) and went back to the Co-0p for dinner.

We did this for the next few days but the most memorable day for me was when we went up this extremely steep hill to check out this farmer’s compost system and plantation. By the time he was done explaining the compost system it had gotten pretty dark, and then we went and checked out the bean plants and stuff. We get down and it’s pitch black out. When we were going to leave it was kind of scary. 2 of the 3 trucks had gotten stuck coming up the hill and if you slid off the side of the road you pretty much tumble for about a mile through the jungle. After we had all hopped into the trucks, I was in the back with my dad, Keith from Peace Coffee, and Tripp from Cafe Campesino (who knows what planet he’s really from). We start to go down and the car starts sliding a little bit and by now everyone in the back of the truck is swearing and laughing and Tripp starts telling us about how he’s using his butt-cheek muscles to hold onto the back latch of the truck where he’s sitting and we all start cracking up. By now we’ve gotten past the scary steep part and we’re flying along the bumpy road again dodging the tree branches that hang low enough to hit and laughing and overall having a really great time.

When it was time to leave we all said our goodbyes. It was an awesome trip and everyone was really nice. My brother Marco and I had our picture taken quite a few times as I don’t think they had seen many white kids before. On the ride back we took taxis over the bumpy road and instead of taking 5 hrs. it took around 45 minutes to get to the bus station. When we got into the town – I have no idea what the town was called – we went and got some cool things from this fair trade/indigenous market. I got a blowgun and some cool bracelets, and I didn’t mention this but in Pangoa I got a machete. After our miniature shopping spree we went and got some dinner.

The bus ride back to Lima was pretty awesome. We had big leather seats and this bus was about 70000000000 times bigger than the other one. It was a double decker, which was pretty cool. On our trip back  I got really cold and we didn’t drink any coca tea so when we went over the pass and came down on the other side our ears popped and cracked and it hurt really bad.

When we got back to the Hotel Senorial, which was at like 6 in the morning we all tried to sleep a little bit. Then at around sometime the whole group had another meeting. I failed to mention there were meetings the day before we left for Pangoa. After the last meeting most of the people I had met left. It was great meeting other people from Coop Coffees  and meeting coffee producers from other countries. Everyone was really nice. The next day we said bye to Bill and our Canadian friends – they were off to Machu Picchu. We would be meeting back up in about a week because we were flying up to Mancora, Peru, while they were flying to Cuzco.

The time at the beach

was a lot of fun. We met some people at a restaurant from Kicking Horse Coffee and met the restaurant owner  Kiki and her husband.They were really nice. The first 2 nights we stayed at a hotel that was not nice and then we moved down the beach a ways to another hotel called Casa de Playa. That hotel was a lot nicer and they had a pool and the service was pretty amazing. The rooms were also clean, which is more than I can say for Casa Dump we had stayed in. I ordered a pancake that was the best in the world and had some really good teriyaki fish. After spending a few pretty amazing days here, we  heard that Bill and our Canadian friends had gotten caught in the whole thing at Machu Picchu(that’s the right spelling to the best of my knowledge). So we left to return to Lima and and met up with two of the three Canadians – the father and son, who had gotten airlifted out. Mom and Bill  were still stuck there. The only reason Michael and Sasha got out was because they were doing children and sick people first. We caught our flight the next day after having dinner with our friends and flew to Houston and then to Denver and back to Spokane. I’m glad we had a short drive home as we were all pretty tired. All in all this trip was pretty amazing. I learned a lot of new things and met a lot of new people and now realize how important it is to be multi-lingual. Thanks for reading my little blog post thingy!!!!

-Dominic

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