Tales of a Travelling Peetnik: Africa in autumn

- By Shirin Moayyad, Coffee Buyer

Remember that 1960’s movie, It’s Tuesday, this Must be Belgium? The story of a tour group that “does” Europe, visiting 7 countries in 18 days? Sometimes that’s what it feels like to be a coffee buyer.

Last month in Africa, Doug and I visited 26 individual farms, cooperatives, mills, grower groups, exporters’ offices and research stations in 10 days, with only a half day’s downtime in between to catch up on jet lag and “bond” with one of our exporters at a game park in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

We started in Nairobi visiting the renowned Nyeri coffee region, drove Southeast through to Tanzania to see the farms by the Ngorongoro Crater, crossed the Great Rift Valley East to see the band of growers, both small and large, on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro and ended by flying back to Kenya for two final days of visits there.

No doubt I sound glib rattling off the above itinerary, but one is conscious of the immense responsibility of representing a company and gathering information – wishing to do so thoroughly, without wasting anyone’s time, in an efficient manner. So you push yourself to absorb and record and research to the point where your eyelids are drooping with exhaustion and it’s all you can do to stay awake. You take so many photographs that if you don’t download them immediately upon returning, you forget all the places you’ve been, and rely heavily on your notes to remember the itinerary.

There are highlights and lowlights. The night we spent at a game park before crossing into Tanzania, I had a bat in my room. On the mosquito net, actually, scampering above my head in bed. Our host, Dirk, kindly obliged by playing The Great White Hunter and removing it gently from my room, wrapped in a bath towel. I’m not fond of creepy crawlies.

The next night, on a farm in Oldeani, I was nearly chomped by safari ants trying to get into the house at the witching hour of midnight. I was awoken by the farm owner out on a rampage, spraying all around and outside the house, particularly my bedroom window which the ants were trying breach.

Apparently some years back a tourist couple left their infant in the car whilst they went to admire a lookout. When they came back, all that remained of their baby was a skeleton, as a trail of safari ants had marched through the vehicle. They’re awful, frightening things that eat anything, even damaging our hosts’ metal toaster in an earlier attack. They presage the rains, the farmer told us, and which he felt were only a few more days off.

We hit a lighter note stopping to picnic in the shade of a baobab tree, crossing the Great Rift Valley en route to Kilimanjaro, where our favourite Tanzanian coffees grow. Shade is hard to find in the valley. It’s a great expanse of over-grazed, badly managed savannah with nothing but scrub and dust for miles around (“mmba”, the local acronym for miles & miles of bloody Africa ). With only days to go before the first rains, the dust filmed over everything in an insidious layer that penetrated the sealed car doors, the air intake vent, our suitcases, my computer carrying case, not to mention my allergic nose.

It seemed inconceivable that there should have been anyone around, but no sooner had we parked and pulled our packed lunch out, did three young Masai women come tearing through the bush at us, giggling, shoving each other, and primping all at once. They were dressed boldly in coloured wrap robes, their necks adorned with multiple ropes of beads, their ears weighted with extravagantly long and shimmering earrings and big beaded bracelets on their arms As they tumbled headlong towards us, I moaned inwardly thinking they’d come to ask something of us, money, pens or worse, my Obama button. Instead, they bolted straight to the car’s side mirrors and proceeded to preen and admire themselves. Like teenage girls the world over, Doug commented and I thought to myself how true.

They were priceless, these girls. I cannot imagine what hidden village they came from as our perch allowed us to see far and away across the plain, and there appeared to be nothing there. We gave them a large bottle of drinking water and asked if I might photograph them – it seemed a fair barter.

One look at themselves in the viewer of the digital camera, however, and they couldn’t get enough of being photographed. They wanted to try the camera themselves (result below), they snatched my sunglasses off me and tried them on (effect below), they fingered my watch and my necklace and generally displayed a self-confidence and attitude that I found hugely endearing. In short, they were characters, and even without a common language, the strength of their personae came through loud and clear.

 

There are these moments that put a touch of hilarity into what can be such exhausting days. We were lucky to be travelling for many of them with a Kenyan-born agronomist, Bill,  who knows anything worth knowing about coffee and who puts all the information one gathers into focus, making meaningful the blur of knowledge and factoids.

Why is Kenyan coffee so superior, we asked Bill? There are too many reasons to list, starting with the superior varieties used in Kenya, the superior soil quality resulting from the slow upwelling of magma; the gentle yet high altitude slopes coffee is planted on; the extreme care given to processing, grading and sorting coffee, the auction system designed to identify the very best….

Perhaps Bill’s most interesting theorem was that of the need to stress coffee growing on the equator, as it does in Kenya. Within five to eight degrees of the equator, trees are too happy, he said. They grow at an even rate and feel no need to flower or propagate themselves. Native to the highlands of Ethiopia and its 3 or 4 annual droughts, coffee was “hard-wired”, so to speak, for stress. Life in Kenya’s lush equatorial garden is altogether too easy and trees don’t feel the threat of extinction and, hence, the need to flower. Without the flowering, there is no fruit, so the trick to farming coffee here is stressing the trees through systematic pruning.

It’s a fascinating concept and makes perfect sense if you think of the trees as if they’re over-indulged people on a tropical holiday, lying by the beach, with no need to stay trim, taut and fit….

Two days before the election, we returned to the US. I could have bartered the Obama button pinned to my jacket a dozen times over for Masai beads or other trinkets. Every reference to the US election brought broad, optimistic grins to people’s faces, vigorous, pumping handshakes, overt delight and a wish to engage us in conversation. Will America elect a Luo before Kenya they wondered. (Mr. Obama’s ancestral tribe is in the minority). And the day after the historic event, back in California and again raked with jet lag, we marveled at the coffees, the people, the beauty of this country that had declared a public holiday to applaud our election.

Comments

[della]

It is my first time to see such wonderful report on Peets.Because No peets' in china :)

[dan rieco]

Im happy you shared you trip with the world.

[angie funtanilla]

please try to get PEETS on Twitter and please put a store in ATLANTA!!

[Josh Friedman]

I see i'm a little late reading this but it's good reading as i hang out at fruitvale peets doing some morning work.

thanks for sharing this interesting story. My partner and I just went to africa for the first time in september and loved everything from the people to the animals to the really nice lodges as well, primarily in Botswana.

I have a great picture of a vendor in Cape Town wearing an Obama button - must have got it from an earlier traveler than you! You can see it posted here if you like.
http://joshfriedman.shutterfly.com

Cheers,
Josh

[Randy]

I love this site and I love coffee. I have been restricted to a acid free diet. Probably a dumb question but before I give up coffee...Does acid free coffee exist. Thought I would ask the experts! Thanks and Happy Travels :-)

[franchise-coffee.net]

This is really great info! We love to see humanitarianism in the coffee industry.

FCN
http://www.franchise-coffee.net

[George]

Sounds like grape vines, the stressed vines set less fruit and that in turn results in the vine putting more (flavor/intensity)into the fruit that it does produce.

[Sandy Helland]

Thanks for writing about this trip. It makes me want to taste something other than your delicious french roast beans. I wish you had a store in Carmichael, California. We have two Starbucks that I never go to.

Loved hearing about the people in Africa and their interest in Obama even though I knew it. It is great to get it from two interesting people who were there recently.

[Greg Huntoon]

Just reading through this post, I can smell the spices in the air. I lived in Zanzibar a few years back (actually, wow, in 1996...12 years ago). Don't think a day has passed since that I haven't thought about the scents and/or the people.

My brother Schon runs Peet's in Hollwood up on Sunset; it's a family affair.

Safari njema!

[Ruth Dundas]

Great writing, Shirin! More than just coffee... Love the teenage girls... Watch out Matthiessen and Bryson!

[Ruth Dundas]

Great writing, Shirin! More than just coffee... Love the teenage girls... Watch out Matthiessen and Bryson!

[paul rader]

Shirin, i love your reports on the blog. great photos, too!