A general funk

Noris is in the city this week, and when the cat's away... the mouse is really bored.

I've been antsy to walk up Volcan Baru.. you can't have a big 11,000 foot hill like that in the neighborhood without wanting to get to the top of it. You can't call it climbing either, if there's a road to the top. So, I thought I'd at least drive up to the end of the paved road and see what will be the start of the walk, on the rough 4-wheel-drive-only road.

From Boquete, it's easy to find the Baru road, which climbs pretty quickly out of the valley and gives some nice views of the town, which I don't have pictures of because it's a narrow road and I didn't see anywhere to pull over. Then you go into a sort of other place, like.. Volcan Poas or Irazu in Costa Rica, or probably other volcanic mountains in Central America. The mountain top itself was shrouded in clouds.

(Click photos for biggerness)

It's a narrow, barely two lane road, with pine and ciprés trees, flowers, and especially- coffee, café, the black gold of the tropical highlands world-wide. You know how much you pay for coffee. The seed has gone from its center of origin in Ethiopia to be grown everywhere in the world that it could be. Pretty good for a plant that probably was just trying to protect itself from herbivores by synthesizing caffeine as a repellent, which turned out to be a necessity for billions of humans. Good work, Coffea arabica.

Coffee is a woody perennial shrub which produces its small fruits along the branches. The harvest is done by hand. The outer pulp is removed and the seeds, or "beans" are dried and later roasted. Yum.

See the beans? Click on the photo. When they're ripe, they'll be red.

Everything is on a steep slope. Some places it looks like you'd need to hire acrobats to tend the plants. One advantage is that you can use gravity to load the trucks from the road side. See the folded red spout?

So I got to the end of the the paved road where the Elantra wasn't going any further, and saw the steam from the radiator. Uh oh.

Well, that will be an adventure for another day. Only 11 kilometers to the top.