Flower & Coffee Trail Tour Day

We made it to our hotel last night at the Crowne Plaza around 10:00pm. Thank God I just graduated with a degree in Spanish because our bus driver didn't know any English. It's been an interesting trip so far with the translating aspect, but it's been a great experience for me to practice some of my Spanish. We arrived at the hotel just fine but apparently we got there during the time of a huge celebration because there were about 1,500 people out by the pool for a fancy dinner and fiesta. Needless to say it wasn't a very quiet night, but it was definitely a fun night, for them at least. It's a beautiful place to stay though, and the rooms are huge. Not to mention the view is incredible to wake up to. We're overlooking the mountainous regions and volcanos. I walked down around 7am this morning to take it all in before our tour guide arrived. I had no idea the view was so beautiful since we arrived late last night and there are no street lights here.

Our tour began with exploring the local markets. People go there everyday to work and sell their products of all kinds. Some sell clothes, others sell food or various random items. We also visited a local Christian church in the town. After that we departed for another gorgeous view of the mountains. We went on a tour with the Flower & Coffee Trail, visiting the town of Ataco in the Apaneca-Lamatepec Mountain Range. El Carmen was the name of the place we toured. It's a working coffee mill that began in 1930 and still uses all of its original equipment. Much of the process is hard labor. In fact, when the coffee plants are first harvested the beans need to be dried out and constantly rotated. They have workers rotating each pile every 30 minutes for 8 hours straight. This can last up to two weeks until the beans reach their specified humidity. Some of the processes after this are done by machines, such as the cleaning. But the sorting of the premium quality beans are all done by hand. Every time there is a new batch ready to be sorted there are about 70 women that sit at a table while the beans are pushed through a conveyer. New batches of beans are released every two minutes so the women must work quickly to pick out the beans of low quality. After that the beans are individually packaged and branded. Some are grounded by machines before they are packaged. We were able to see all of the beans they have stored in their barn ready to be shipped to buyers. They have hundreds, maybe even a thousand bags of coffee beans. Throughout all that hard manual labor, the beans are finally ready to be sold. I bought a package of ground coffee beans for a mere $5.50. I'd think that after all the work it takes to sell the beans in their final state they'd be more expensive, but everything is relatively cheap in this country, including the local artisan shops. We visited a few of them in different cities on our way back to San Salvador and stopped in by The House of Coffee as part of the tour to try some of El Salvador's best coffee. Afterwards we had lunch at Restaurante R&R. We were served a locally-made peanut butter shake for a beverage, a potato and cheese (papa y queso) appetizer, and barbecue chicken for a meal. I bought a few souvenirs from craft shops in the town we were in, Juayua, and also went to a reptile museum called Reptilandia where I got to hold a python. The owner said he weighed over 150 pounds; I definitely could tell because he was straining my neck. He also must've just eaten some rabbits. On that note, we're about to eat dinner now that we're all back at the hotel. Everyone for our build on Monday has arrived so we're having dinner provided by Habitat. The rest of the night will be free reign!