Guatemala Day 9: Coffee Museum

We spent a beautiful morning at the Centro Cultural la Azotea, sandwiched between the city of Antigua and the base of the mountain.

First came the coffee museum, but our tour kind of went backwards in time, so I am going to reverse the order of some of the pictures to take you through the process more or less. Less because I don’t remember everything!!

Unfortunately, I failed to take a picture of the baby plants. They are about three years old before they blossom for the first time. This plantation plants the coffee trees under taller to trees to give shade and let the “cherries,” as the coffee fruit is called, develop more slowly. Banana plants are scattered throughout the plantation. They harvest the bananas as well, but the main reason is that banana plants store water during the rainy season and release it back into the soil in dry season. Very clever, to my thinking.

We are in the midst of harvest right now (December to March), but this is how the coffee looks as it ripens.

Harvest is still a labor-intensive, by-hand process. The harvested cherries are weighed and dumped through these bars into a bath. Cherries that aren't yet ripe float and are skimmed off for separate processing.

If you roll the cherry in your palm to soften it and then squeeze it lightly, you get first a sweet acidic juice and then the seeds. The plantation does this by machine in a wet process.

The beans are spread in the sun to dry for several days and turned regularly with the rake you see standing up here. The dark beans in the foreground are those that were under-ripe and need special treatment. Not sure if these are the ones that get made into instant coffee, but Guillermo definitely said it was the rejects that go into that. Steve would tell you that explains a lot.

Sacks of dried, unroasted, coffee can be stored for a couple years without losing quality.

The beans have to be sorted for size before they are roasted because otherwise they won't roast at the same rate. According to Guillermo, the darker the roast, the less caffeine. He calls it "burned coffee," but then he likes the instant he grew up on, so he lost credibility with most of us.

Besides the tour, a small museum explained the process and a little about the family that has owned this plantation for a hundred years. It is an interesting story of German immigrants and Mayas and a matriarchal lineage system. The present owner is the one who came up with the idea of brining in tourists to supplement the coffee income. 

Our tour ended with a demitasse of coffee and of course, a gift shop.

Then we crossed the courtyard to the music museum in the next post. [I'm tired, so I won't get that up until morning, but it included a fabulous performance by four brothers.

Guatemala Day 8: Las Capuchinas Convent

Built in 1736 using the latest techniques to avoid earthquake damage, the Convent of the Capuchinas mostly survived the 1773 earthquake that led to the abandonment of the city.

I took a dozen pictures of the cloister, every one a different angle with different flowers.

The most interesting feature of the convent is the circular tower where 17 of the most devout nuns would be locked in (after purification in special baths) for the forty days of Lent with a VERY limited diet. They spent their time praying the rosary.

Of course, the roof to the circular tower is gone.

Each cell had a drop toilet into a sewer of flowing water with a vent above.

Here is a restored cell. (Bathroom on the right, storage on the left. The nun is NOT real although several of us were startled by her presence.)

Some of my blog readers made sure I saw this great garden view from one of the cells.

Beneath the circular tower was the wine cellar for communion wine and bread. The church requires wheat in the host, and wheat was not grown in the area for a couple hundred years after the arrival of the Spanish, so it all had to be imported. No local grapes or wine in the early days either.

Upstairs is a museum of 18th c religious art--the period just before the city was abandoned. No photos allowed in the museum, but I couldn't resist another view of the cloister.

The church associated with the convent is in ruins. Young men were scrubbing modern graffiti from the walls of the balcony while we were there.

Around every corner there is another lovely garden like this one behind the laundry.

I'll keep my washing machine, thank you.

Guatemala Day 8: Exploring Antigua

At 9 AM we set off on foot. Just walking the streets of Antigua is an aesthetic experience. The dormant Agua Volcano due south of the city is a good point of orientation.

Fuego Volcano, the only active one is the area, could be seen spewing smoke at various times throughout the day.

Some of my fellow travelers have begun reading this blog. They sometimes pointed out interesting things to photograph like these window ornaments.

We started in the central plaza.

There Guillermo introduced us to some of his friends and together they showed us how to tell the difference between fabrics woven traditionally and those made using a treadle loom.

The Cathedral faces the square.

We thought at first that the cathedral was closed, but Carlos found a side door open. The reason the front doors were closed was this restoration project.

Only a small part at the front of the cathedral has been restored.

Most of the nave looks like this.

Antigua is a UNESCO site. Much has been restored, but much is still in ruins. UNESCO says that adds to the charm of the city.

Although most of La Merced church was destroyed in the 1976 earthquake, the eclectic facade survived.

We also visited the Convent of the Capuchinas, but THAT merits its own post.

Like our hotel, most of the shops and building in the center city were private homes of wealthy Spaniards in the 16th to 18th centuries, built in the Sevillian syle around courtyards. You can wander into any with an open door. Lunch was at Restaurant Las Antorchas, another of these beautiful courtyard homes.

In the afternoon Steve and I did some wandering, including hot chocolate in the courtyard of the Chocolate Museum. Steve got boring old "classic" brought in an ordinary ceramic mug with hot milk in a plain glass pitcher. (Ok, so he had to mix his chocolate and milk.) I tried the Mayan chocolate. Much more interesting--melted chocolate, hot milk, ground chili peppers and honey for me to mix to taste in a cool pottery mug. OK, so I probably put in a bit more chili than I should have, but WOW! Definitely worth the experience.

Guatemala Day 7: Getting to Antigua

Following our unexpected morning, we left Villa Maya at 1 PM for the ten-hour trip to Antigua.  We got word that the barricade had been taken down and after about an hour we began meeting the long string of cars and trucks that had been delayed in the opposite direction. We were very grateful not to have spent the morning sitting in the sun along the road.

When we stopped at a Texaco station for what Guillermo called “a wee-wee break,” he said he hoped there would be toilet seats in all the stalls. Caravan provided toilet seats a couple months ago, but some disappeared. I thought it was cool that Caravan would invest in the places they frequent to make them more desirable, not just for their own clients, but for others as well.

While we waited for everyone to be ready, we watched some cowboys wrangling a cow in this truck. She wanted to lie down, but if she did, she would soon be trampled by the other cattle as they shifted in the confined space. Guillermo pointed out that the cattle had probably had five or six extra hours in the back of the truck waiting at the barricade.

The dinner that had been planned for our hotel in Antigua was rescheduled for the restaurant where we stopped for a break on the way north—the peacock place. It was served quickly. The taste was fine, but they obviously had had it ready for us for a while.

We arrived at Hotel Porta Antigua a little after 11 as expected—probably the most beautiful hotel I have ever stayed in, but then I have been enamoured with courtyard houses since high school Latin class.

Our room has a fourteen-foot ceiling and a fireplace.

I took this of the reception area the morning after we arrived.

A corridor goes under the street to another part of the hotel where the resturant is.

That courtyard is lovely at night.

But the pool is pretty ordinary compared to ours. Too bad it is too chilly to want to get wet.

Still, the other part of the hotel is pretty nice in the evening at dinner time.

We met at 9 AM for a walking tour of the town. That merits not one, but two, blog entries.

Guatemala Day 7: an Unexpected Morning

Due to a protest march and blockade of the road back to Guatemala City, we ended up with an extra morning at Villa Maya. Here's how some of it went.

The birders went out anyway and after about half an hour the rain let up, so I followed, taking my umbrella as well as my phone/camera, and hoping I had enough mosquito dope on. I never found the birders, but it was a great time to stretch out those tight muscles from yesterday's exertion.

This is a pretty civilized trail for a walk in the jungle, but I was alone and didn't want to get lost. Guillermo gives us warnings like "This trail does not go all the way around the lake; you must turn around and come back." Then he reminds us that behind all advice there is a story. I didn't want to be his next story.

Near the hotel the yellow gravel trail twists back and forth. It reminded me of a park trying to fit a 1-mile jogging path into limited space, but I suspect it is to that birders can get a variety of views without leaving the path.

Nice views back toward the hotel.

On the way out I came to a clearing with some sort of foundation. I wondered what building had been abandoned. I returned on a road that passed closer and found it was not an abandoned foundation, but a helocopter pad. Nice to know we wouldn't have to do that long winding road in an emergency.

Time to pack the computer so the luggage can be loaded for departure after lunch. It will be a long day.