If you travel, perhaps you have been somewhere that confuses you a bit, where things don't quite add up, where you can't get a good sense of where you are. Perhaps that happens geographically, because it seems like some places you have been, and unlike any place you have been as well. Perhaps its the local culture, the people, unlike any you have encountered. Perhaps its the economy, you can't get the monetary conversion right; it's cheap one place and ridiculously expensive another. Perhaps it's security, and you can't decide whether all the happy smiling people are friendly, or whether, in a different circumstance, they would steal everything you possess. What if it's all those things. What if every ten minutes or so, someone says something that you just can't quite believe the said. Like "that guy with the crutches on the road, I had to shoot his leg, during the siege, when the village elder told the locals it's okay to take our farm and kill us." But then you just sorta wave...

About the title ...I lied. It was not that fun, and definitely not for profit. We were in Guatemala as the NY coffee market hit a 34 year high (profit for the exporters and market speculators, very hard on the coffee buyers!) as well as an odd climate with elections coming up soon. Lider, just plain odd. Add to this the problems in the north with narco traffic and gangs, and traveling without local guidance in a rental car, and in hindsight the trip seems a tad unwise. 3 people were shot dead at a restaurant near Huehue at noon the day before we arrived. Another coffee buyer was held up at gunpoint. It's the wild wild west here. Still, there are a lot of hard-working coffee producers tied to their land and their crop, which is worth more this year than for many previous. That is creating more instability though. With the high coffee cherry prices, trees are being picked at night time by theives, coffee stolen from patios and warehouses. And all the candidates promise Order and...

I find myself in Costa Rica again, but it took so long to upload these pictures, that it is not even my most recent trip there. In any case, this place has become difficult to work. It's the easiest coffee producing country for US buyers to hit, and the pricing for coffees that cup well (and many that don't) has become ridiculous. You can't blame exporters and farmers for trying to get the most, but you would hope they might value longer term relationships over the most recent yokel to come along and buy ridiculously small amounts of coffee at ridiculously huge prices. What about the cup? Wasn't it all supposed to be about the cup? Sometimes it seems the train has left the tracks... in any case there are still good coffees in CR and still good farmer and farms. Here are a few... -Tom

I went to Colombia again. The main point of this trip was to get to the coffee areas in south Tolima, Rioblanco and Herrera. Because it was a bastion of FARC and the Paramilitarios, it was considered one of the last unstable places. It seemed perfectly fine with me, even though the DAS police came to my hotel in Chaparral town to check on what a gringo was doing in the area! After a great trip to Tolima we faced a heinous drive to Neiva, then down to Pitalito and San Augustin in South Huila. Upon a return to Bogota, we flew up to see the work of Oswaldo Acevedo at Mesa De Los Santos, a coffee we have not seen for years here at SM. Images of his unique cultivar garden occupy the later half of this picture log. It took me a while to sort through the images. I just take too many pictures. In fact, as I write this I am headed back to Colombia for the Cup of Excellence in a couple weeks. Ah well, I think I will leave the behemoth camera at home and take a point and shoot this time. -Tom...