Puerto Rico’s Ruta del Café (Coffee Route)

Moving deeper into the mountains from Ponce, sticking to the famed Ruta Panorámica, Puerto Rico’s landscape takes a drastic turn. Buick size ferns grow out into the road and patches of green bamboo form a canopy over it. Avocados and oranges fall from trees and rot on the pavement, filling the air with a beautifully pungent aroma. The chirps of the coqui are constant. I have flashbacks of Dominica and Costa Rica.

In Jayuya, I get lost looking for my parador. I stop four times and each time I’m told something different. Jayuya isn’t big, but five different highways meet here and twist in a maze of one ways. A kid at the gas station draws me a map with loops and no’s and x’s where the road would end. I lose the trail but pick up the familiar Parador road markers.

Hacienda Gripiñas is a 150-year-old Spanish farmhouse that has been the social center of Jayuya, a coffee plantation, and the home of the founder of the village. The building maintains the history in clapboard walls, red tile roof, balconies overlooking coffee fields & trees. Wooden shutters are all open so the citrus scented air blows throughout the creaky old building. My room on the second level has a rocking chair, beamed ceilings, and a rose bush molded on the drywall. In the dining room the walls are filled with the linear notes of criollo folk songs. As they make my dinner the women, who are dressed in plantation style uniforms and aprons, sing from the kitchen.

“Al-go par-a to-mar,” my waiter asks in a tranquillo, cordillera twang. “Qu-er-ies ar-roz con hab-i-chue-las o pla-ta-nos ma-dur-os?” He says “Buen pro-ve-cho,” as my Asopao is served. The entire time he has this wise smile on his face like he knows some secret to living.

The route through the cordillera is pure coffee land. Puerto Rico was once a coffee powerhouse and its shade grown beans competed with Hawaii’s Kona and Jamaica’s Blue Mountain. On becoming a commonwealth they lost their touch, but appear to be back on the rise. After a quick stop at some Taino petroglyphs I go to Hacienda San Pedro, a coffee plant, just outside of Jayuya. The bodega wasn’t open yet, but the guys at the plant didn’t mind if I wanted to look around. It was more industrial than I expected, so I headed west to Hacienda Patricia, a century old artisanal plant that hand picks and sun dries their beans. A younger man peaks his head out a window when I pull up.

“Can I buy coffee here?” I ask.

He waves me in. I enter a concrete room with a table where there was just a sealed plastic bin and a scale. He opens the bin and the scent of the Arabica wafts through the air. Why don’t they serve this in the hotels? I could taste it without tasting it. At $12 a pound, it wasn’t cheap. He weighed it out, ground it right there, and sealed and stickered the bag. Walking out he asks if I want to take a look around. We go to a room with newly picked green and red beans and then a darker room with drying racks. We step out on a walkway, which sticks out of the side of a hill with a full panoramic view of the lush green mountains, where they place the racks to dry. If quality were related to the beauty of the place it is grown and processed, this would win awards.

I pull over at Maricao’s central plaza to ask a wrinkled old woman in a floral dress for directions. Even before I could ask her directions for Hacienda Juanita, she asked “De donde eres, Papi?” When I tell her she laughs. Then she points me up over the hill.
Hacienda Juanita is a working 24-acre coffee plantation. Like Hacienda Gripiñas, the cooler climate here brings weekend travelers who come to escape the heat of the cities and hike in the nearby Maricao State Forest or kick back in their pool or tennis courts. Their dining room, another of the Mesones, serves criollo dishes, using mostly the fruit and vegetables found on their property, that follows the original 18^th century plantation recipes. For the second night in a row I order asopao. The dish is Puerto Rico’s version of chicken soup that mixes rice with sofrito and a list of optional additions like pigeon peas, olives, capers, bay leaves, achiote, and oregano. For the second night in a row it is different.

At check-in they gave me a hand drawn map to a nearby waterfall, Salto de Curet. I have to follow a twisting unpaved mountain road through coffee plantations and then park my car in a dirt lot. The map says to follow an unmarked trail and cross a small stream three times and then turn and walk up the stream until reaching the waterfall. After about twenty sweaty minutes I find a clearing and a breathtaking 50-foot cascade and emerald pool below it. Looking in my bag I realize my bathing suit is still in my room. That pool looked refreshing though. I take a look around and no one is anywhere in sight. The hills are impassable on every side except the way I came. Being a Wednesday morning, no one is coming anyway. When else would I have a chance to do this? I strip down and dive in. It’s bone chillingly cold, but undeniably cleansing.

At dinner, I ask my waitress Rosa if there is a story behind the Pastelón de Guineos Juanita I’m eating. I hadn’t seen anything quite like it before. It’s a sort of corned beef with peas and corn with a bottom and top layer of soft guineos maduros. It looks like a slice of pie.

“A story?” She thinks for a moment. “Well, this is the only place you will find that dish in Puerto Rico. Everyone else uses platano, but we’ve used the guineos ever since the restaurant began. They’re sweeter.”

So there is a story.

IF YOU GO:
Hacienda Juanita
Style: The grandeur of an original Nineteenth century plantation. Location: A 24-acre fruit and coffee plantation in the western highlands. Accommodation: 21 typically decorated rooms with poster beds. Rates: From $107 per night. Amenities: Pool, bar, tennis courts, access to hiking trails, and their own Meson Gastronomico. Contact: 787-836-2550; www.haciendajuanita.com.

Nile River Journeys

The River Nile is long, with many ways to traverse her wide flat waters. Boats have been sailing the Nile on the puffs of breezes for centuries, carrying trade and people. The traditional dahabiya, felucca and sandal boats, the ones with the tall graceful sails and bows lying low in the water, and variations of, suit the waters and lack of wind perfectly and create a particularly romantic white-sailed scene, but newer yachts are now mixing in among the paddle steamers that ran her waters in the 19th Century. If you have your own boat to sail be aware that the waters are wide but that the riverbed is scooped and shallow.
The thing about cruising the Nile is that it’s a relatively simple trip, not at all challenging sailing wise, but it’s really the only way to carve through the desert and see the sights of ancient Egypt – this is, after all the way the Pharaohs traveled.
The main sailing route passes between Aswan and Luxor, while some people insist on going upstream towards the dam, the sailors route would always be downstream leaving Aswan and arriving in Luxor. Advice would be to see Abu Simbel before you take to your boat. The temples here, carved magnificently out if the rosy orange cliffs are a fantastic taster for what’s coming. If you have a guide they’ll tell you the temple had to be moved when the dam was built so it didn’t flood. Camel caravan would be nice, but if you don’t quite have time to really play Pharoh, you can fly. Aswan as a city is so much cleaner that Cairo. It’s a fusion of African and Egyptian design and culture.
Dock at Kom Ombo for the Temple of Sobek and Horus, which has beautifully tactile carved stone columns, and the Chapel of Hathor containing, to my children’s delight, the mummified remains of hundreds of crocodiles. At Edfu for a more famous Temple of Horus and at Esna the silt covered (or sunken as it’s often called) Temple of Khnum. But these are just leading up to the glory of Luxor, from where you visit the temples of Luxor and Karnak. On the other side of the Nile is the Valley of the Kings. When you’re walking amongst the temple pillars and see the Nile beyond, lined with farmers, this just feels like one the most amazing journeys imaginable.
Life on board isn’t as leisured and luxurious as an Agatha Christie novel. The desert is pretty impossible during the middle of the day, especially for people not used to it, so you have to time your temple visits for the mornings or afternoons. If you can manage it, mornings were less crowded in my experience.
A dahabiya is my recommendation if you’re renting a boat. Most often you’re renting them with a crew and other guests, but some companies will allow you to rent without, or else get something smaller if you want to sail it yourself. A dahabiya is a great for the wide, flat open deck, a perfect additional space for meals and picnics under the desert stars. The relaxed lifestyle of alfresco dining and living above deck really topped off the experience, which was always going to be amazing for the history and the desert, the crazy markets and the desert scenery.
October through February are the best months. The sand storms start up in late march.