Lima and Miami In Bolivia coca leaves in hot water is the drink recommended for altitude adaptation. It’s what they grow, so it’s what they drink. In Peru they grow some pretty good beans. We’ve handled some Peruvian fairtrade at Fair Grinds Coffeehouse to brew a good cup, so it’s not as if there isn’t anything to work with there.
But, the common fare that passes for a cup of coffee along the Andes is really pretty terrible. A black sludge of sort is brewed and then cut with hot water. In fact, in Cochabamba the coffee urn was specially designed with two spigots, one for the sludge and one for the water. At the other end of the spectrum were largely Star bucks-type shops with modernistic designs like 4D, Star Coffee, and others. There are occasional exceptions like Barrisco’s in Peru down from our office in Jesus Maria, but these are all espresso based coffees. When discussing the phenomena with Orfa Camacho, ACORN Peru’s head organizer, she both boasted that Peru had the second best coffee in South America after Columbia, and then flatly stated that the problem was that “people don’t know how to make coffee.”
I made it by cheating. I carried my 2-cup stainless steel plunge pot, picked up on my last visit to Mumbai with Vinod Shetty for a couple of bucks and a pound of Fair Grinds New Orleans Blend, fairtrade coffee & chicory. We would have a good cup in the morning, and hope that lasted through the day with a shot of espresso somewhere on the trail if we were lucky.
But, why, is coffee so disregarded and abused. The folks we would see in the Starbucks-wannabe places were teens and post-teens drinking fancy sugar-and-milk drinks where coffee is an afterthought. The workday folks were forced to drink swill. It seems like there’s a real opportunity for some evangelizing on the coffee trail, if we had the energy and resources. In the meantime, it’s just sad that life in the morning is made so hard for our Peruvian and Bolivian brothers and sisters.
Speaking of sad thoughts, another one is landing in the Miami International Airport after a long international flight from anywhere. The MIA folks have done a lot of construction on the airport and its concourses in recent years, and it is an improvement though every report notes that the distances traveled between concourses and the slowness of the SkyTrain are both absurdly ridiculous still.
All of this pales next to the problem of flight transfer. MIA is the only airport I can recall where when you clear customs with your luggage there is no way to immediately transfer it to your carrier for your connecting flight. Yes, really! So, you come out of customs and then have to schlep your luggage jammed packed with everything you could haul back from your adventures from the customs clearance to whatever your concourse might be. In our case that was D where we were picking up American as another part of the One World fiasco. Between conveyor walkways that were shutdown, we strong-armed our bags a half-mile or more, and I’m not kidding. All of which was great exercise, but is this any way to run either an airport or our airlines? As Orfa would say, they just don’t seem to know how to make airports in Miami, I guess?
