The harvest and the paparazzi

Early start flying to Yogyakarta (Yogy) away from our beloved 'lations. Big kisses to Hoolia (Julia) and Sipupu for your amazingly generous hospitality 😁 Washerwoman Eric spent most of the night in the laundry 🤣 carry on luggage limiting our wardrobe

Our guide, Dhedy, most punctually arrived and up to the higher plantation elevations we sped.

The padi fields opened up before us and the road deteriorated as we chugged up to the mountains.

Our lunch destination seemed a reasonable enough distance up the hill, through the wavering heat haze and doused in DEET and permethrin we trod carefully on a goat track slightly too narrow for Eric and Bill's big cloppers. Huffing, sweating and puffing we paused to chat with wizened putris (grandmothers) with elastic muscular skeletal systems, big smiles and daunting work ethics as they planted the rice in swaying, backwards moving formation.

I came across the expression: "rukun agawe santosa, crah agawe bubrah" : our strength lies in our ability to work together. Java has amazed us with how all strive for tolerance and forbearance in all things despite there being 160 million people all needing to co-exist.

Back to our hard slog 😉 we finally reached the, at times, seemingly mythical coffee shop and were treated to lunch in our own pagoda overlooking a vast, expansive view of green rice fields, lush rainforest and shimmering distant purple mountains. Lunch was waiting in neat woven boxes of the freshest and most tantalising treat of rendang, satay, noodles, yellow rice and fresh fruit; we squished our long caucasian legs into some form of cross leggedness - (Eric failed) to eat our Indonesian feast (after we swallowed a good handful of tummy tabs to be safe).

Being a coffee plantation we were of course treated to a very smooth brew and then the paparazzi closed in...

Being a new business the 'Bules' in the pagoda were prime fat marketing material. So along came Dodi the smooth, snake charmer and whisperer of coffee beans and with a large retinue of cameraman and curious randoms, our coffee picking apparatus provisioned, up the mountain we were marched to earn our lunch.

To be continued...Läs mer