coffee fertilizer to the beach

First, i´d like to add something i forgot to mention in the last post. At the culture center for teaching music to inner city kids the founder gave a short speech. In this he said ¨we are not here to become the best musicians we are here to share something, we may not best the best, but we are doing something¨ This was a very inspiring moment.

To start off, on monday mike and I got to travel down into Sonare to pick up fertilizer. We went to the coffee processing center in town where they have a machine that splits the outer shell of the coffee bean away from the inside. We spent the day scooping the outer shells into sacks to bring back to the farm to use as fertilizer. The two farmers we went with, Chivo and Keelder, also bought us some lunch in town at an amazing empanada stand, delicious!

Tuesday morning, not so bright and very early we left town for a journey to the beach. 2 hour bus ride, followed by 5 hours, followed by another hour. The last hour was mega-sweet because it involved going over a mountain through a national park with waterfalls and everywhere. On the other side of the mountain theres the small fishing town and small tourist beach of Choroni.

We spent 3 nights camping on the beach. After the first night we made lots of friends with fellow campers and travellers from all over. The campers, ranging from locals, high school trips, college students on break, and worldwide travelers were all awesome and we banded together for an awesome couple of days.
Then it was some more long bus rides back to town. By the way the bus rides here are insane. Every bus seems to be equipped with a mega-sound system which the driver will not fail to use to blast any of many sorts of latin american music for the entire ride. On the way back I thought we were lucky to get a more luxury-like bus for the 5 hour ride, but that ends up meaning lots and lots and lots and lots of air conditioning. It was a bit cold.
So now I´m back in monte carmelo well actually i´m typing from a cyber cafe in sonare but you know what i mean. Tomorrow is the big election and we will know the results by late tomorrow night. It´s really exciting and has been slowly dawning on me the importance of this vote for the country and maybe the world.

Peace and Love