Buena Vista

We are staying at a coffee cooperative and training center called Comun Yap Nop Tik on the edge of the Triumfo Biofera Reserva in the southern section of the state of Chiapas. We arrived two nights ago with a desire to be closer to the rain forest and taken care of (after a miserable night at a crummy hotel in a small town a few hours north), both of which we definitively are. We arrived late in the afternoon unannounced and were welcomed by a team of farmers and community developers who were enthusiastic about meeting our needs and welcoming our family. One of the associates claims to have read Peter’s papers and be a big fan (We are a bit incredulous, since Peter hasn’t exactly published any papers, but anyway.).

We are staying in a bunk house which is intended for farmers and students when they come for lengthy trainings on sustainable farming and business development. Peter is to spend two days visiting coffee plantations and measuring carbon in uncultivated forest types near the reserve. We are here to finally, actually go with him into the field, and get as far into rural Mexico as we can.

 The first night we were the only occupants of the spacious women’s bunk room, taking over most of the 18 beds with our many bags of souvenirs, laundry and sundry equipment. The kids immediately settled in to setting up their beds, making forts and exploring the various grounds and buildings of the training center, happy to be out of the car and hopefully in one place for a few days. We had a homemade meal on the porch of a neighboring house/ restaurant. Over dinner we talked with a junior at Cornell who is here conducting research on a fungus blight for his senior thesis, and a trainer by the name of Jose Alfredo Alvarez who pledged to do whatever he could to make Peter’s time here productive. They worked out a plan for the following day for us to visit some of the true forests in the heart of the reserve so Peter could get a sense of the carbon in the uncultivated native forests of the Sierra Madre. We would accompany him, at last, and get a sense of what his field work looks like in living color.

The following morning the plan was for the team to meet at 8 am, have breakfast together at 9 am, and leave by 9:30 am in a truck for a small village and coffee plantation further up in the mountains. I had the kids washed, fed, dressed and sunscreened at 9, but at 9:15 the meeting was still in full swing and I knew we were going to be behind schedule, so I released them to play and settled in to checking email, etc. We finally moved over to breakfast at the restaurant at 10. At 11 we learned that the truck we were planning on using would not make it up the mountain, so they had called for another which was on its way. At 1:00 pm we finally loaded up the original truck (we would meet the better truck further up the road) and were on our way. Jasper and Josie piled into the back of the pick-up truck with us, thrilled to be bouncing along the dirt roads in the open air, pledging they were going to tell EVERYONE about it. They were giddy about being able to “touch the clouds” when we got up into the cloud forest.

We climbed up and up and up, stopping for another 45 minutes at a river to await a four-wheel drive vehicle to take us up to the furthest community and coffee plantation at nearly 2,000 meters. When the better, much-needed truck arrived, we continued on our way, another hour up winding dirt roads that seemed impassable until you saw a Volkswagen Beetle parked outside a small cinderblock house off the road.

Finally we reached our destination. A small coffee grower’s plantation called “Buena Vista.” And the vista was more than buena. It was maravillosa. The entire valley from which we had come was stretched out below us, mountains all around shrouded in the afternoon rain clouds, the Triumfo Reserve behind us. Josie and Jasper ran ahead of us towards the farm house and patio, and Josie came back calling, “Mama, there’s a restaurant up here!” Even after I explained that this was someone’s home, and they had just prepared a table to share their food with us, she asked where the menu was. Don Ciro (age 94) and his family served us a lunch of chicken soup and handmade tortillas. Only the rice had been purchased; everything else was from their small farm. While Peter headed into the hills with the men to measure trees and talk coffee, Don Ciro’s granddaughter walked with us through coffee and fruit trees, pointing out plants and animals along the way, trying to keep up with Jasper and Josie who were scampering far ahead.

We spent another blissful hour chatting with Don Ciro about his purchase of this land in 1955 for 700 pesos, and his life working on a German coffee plantation before that, until the team returned and we were ready to descend. It was 6 pm and the sun was already behind the mountains.

The ride down was colder and more exhausting. When we reached the juncture where we had picked up the four wheel drive truck, we took a right turn instead of heading down the mountain, and began to climb through a different valley. Jasper noticed and was immediately concerned. It was 7:00 by this time and well time for dinner and a shower. We were sitting in the bed of the truck, so we couldn’t ask about the change of plans. After another 30 minutes, we approached a massive coffee plantation with a veritable village of workers at its heart. A stark contrast to the beautiful farm we had just left, this plantation had rows and rows of wood and sheet metal shacks crowded around a central fountain. It was nearly dark when the truck stopped at the center and we were told that we would have to wait there for “a few minutes” while the driver shuttled some of the workers further up the road. The kids were hungry, exhausted and a little shell shocked. We were escorted to our guide’s niece’s house. She was not expecting us, but managed to pull together some quesadillas while we sat and watched The Dictator in Spanish and chatted with his family while awaiting the car.

An hour later the truck arrived and we loaded once again. This time I sat inside the cab with Josie and Jasper, who finally fell asleep as we crept back down the mountain through the dark. We arrived at the Comun after 10 pm, covered in bug bites, filthy, hungry and beyond tired. But we had touched the clouds, and it was well worth the rocky landing.