Tales from the road... 

Our blog is not the place for sales updates, advertising or meeting reports – it is instead the place for us to share our musings from the field, the sort of thing that gives coffee its setting, a few thoughts from the road in our beloved Africa. 

Episode 1:

Dusty Tuskers & Thirsty Cruisers - Why London Docklands is second fettle to the Ngorongoro

It’s the start of the Bank Holiday weekend and London City Airport is in absolute chaos. Our Cityjet flight to Amsterdam is overbooked by 40% and a man who in my head I call Forrest after his Gump-like competence has half checked us in and then wandered off somewhere. By the time he returns the flight has closed so he wanders off somewhere else. We have been put on standby. Our connecting flight to Nairobi leaves from Amsterdam in an hour and a half.  It’s chuffing hot and a German woman is protesting loudly about how her reason to get on the plane is better than everyone else’s. It’s a mad dash to the gate where we are finally given a seat twenty minutes after the flight is supposed to have departed and we run onto the plane.  I can see our bags on the tarmac and wonder whether they will be able to keep up with us, fingers crossed, but I’ve got a feeling that they won’t. I’ve been to a lot of airports in my time, from Heho in Burma where you are you own baggage handler to Gonder in Ethiopia which doesn’t have electricity but does have ladies weaving reed baskets in the check-in area.  I went to Singapore once, where there’s a cinema and rooftop pool. Most airports are alright. In fact, I love an airport, particularly if it has free wifi and can rustle up a black-eye macchiato. But that afternoon at City was the worst airport experience of all time; it was more like Tahrir Square in there than Terminal 1.

Two sweating messes eventually dash through Schiphol to take up temporary residence on the palatial Kenya Airways triple-seven which whisks us in perfect, gin-filled service to the place where dreams are made into reality: Africa.  The plane descends through an African sunrise into the remarkable Nairobi Jomo-Kenyatta: A colossal fire tore through the whole place a couple of years ago and by the next day, baggage sheds and marquees had been converted into a terminal and the whole place was operational again. That speed of turnaround is just astonishing and for me shows an example of the wonderful resourcefulness of Africa. That would never happen at Heathrow, though after this trip I can only assume that City would only benefit from being razed to the ground.  

The Nairobi baggage carousel chugs on and on and needless to say, our bags are still in City.  Probably still on the tarmac if we’re honest. We arrange for them to be forwarded down to Kilimajaro where we can collect them in a couple of days time; Christ, I’d better buy some deodorant and some clean pants. We’ve got many hundreds of kilometers to smash this afternoon to get down to the luscious coffee hills of Northern Tanzania.

It’s 9am by the time we remove ourselves from the confines Jomo Kenyatta. I take a deep breath of Kenyan morning air: my word I love Africa. There’s such an energy about it, be it here in Nairobi, the mountains of Ethiopia or the rainforests of Guinea, there’s an upbeat pizzazz to the whole place, a feeling of ingenuity and genuine friendliness that I haven’t found anywhere else in the world. Following purchase of a Kenyan rugby shirt and a pair of oversize jeans, we head South on gloriously smooth roads down to the Tanzanian border. The scenery starts to grow out of the suburban sprawl as the concrete jungle is replaced by the rolling hills and acacia trees of the lush Kenyan bush. The rains that water the coffee seedlings have ended and dusty little roadside bars selling cold Tusker beer sit alongside the ubiquitous Airtel and Safaricom phone shops, often with 40-year-old Land Rovers parked alongside.  We manage to drive through a sewer, market and charcoal processing plant and miss the Tanzanian border, but as we eventually cross into Tanzania, the mountains start to grow and we know that the coffee-growing hills are not far away. A soft African sun starts to set over the Burka Coffee Estate as we pass by, the day fading into a wonderful pastel glow. Replace the coffee for vines and these dusty, tree-lined avenues could pass for Avignon rather than Arusha, the evening light casting long shadows of our Land Cruiser as it bounces through the potholes.

A well known fact is that a Toyota never breaks. That’s why so-called ISIS depends on Hilxes, though it must be said that theirs are noticeably newer than the one that we use on my parents’ farm back home. My Land Cruiser rental here is fifteen-years old and has had a hard life covering 80,000 miles across the wilds of East Africa. I’ve been hooning it down to the border which it has taken in its stride, though by sunset it clearly feels that it has earned itself a stiff sundowner, using half a tank of fuel over about a hundred kilometers. As the sun dips below the horizon, the old girl is clearly on a Winehouse-style bender, downing a whole quarter-tank in twelve clicks.  We are a long way from any petrol stations and of course I haven’t brought a Jerry can with me – even if I had tried it would still be at City airport. The good news, however, is that this is Africa, so whatever you want cannot be far away. We pull off the road into a Massi boma, the settlements enclosed by a ring of acacia thorns so as to keep the corralled animals inside safe from attack by predators.  A Massi chap called Simon has some petrol in a bucket in his shed which after some swift negotiation and price-hiking, he agrees to sell me. Said bucket looks like it has had a plethora of uses meaning that this is more likely to be Shell fly-and-placenta power than V-Power. The whole thing smells horrific. I very nearly achieved the impossible once and broke a Toyota with some dodgy petrol in Botswana, so I must say I was somewhat apprehensive about filling Amy up with the crud from this bucket. But of course, the 6 cylinders surge to life and with many smiles and waves off we toddle into the African night, leaving promises to the Masai that we will pop back in the next time we are passing, in the hope that we can double their annual income once more by buying a few liters of Benzine.

We are heading to Karatu, on the edge of the Ngorongoro Crater. At 19km wide and 264km2, the Ngorongoro is one of the largest unbroken calderas in the world and wildlife galore strolls the crater floor, trapped by the crater’s sheer sides. More than just bringing tourists, it is this prehistorically volcanic landscape that allows Tanzania to grow such excellent coffee. The rich volcanic soil is perfect for coffee plants to draw nutrients whilst the land itself has formed as high altitude plateaus. The coffee around Karatu grows between 1,800 and 2,300m, meaning that the coffee’s profile is more pronounced and distinctive than those grown lower down.  The coffee also benefits from better soil drainage on the mountain whilst the cool nights and warm days combined with the volcanic soils further accentuates the flavours.

There is only one thing I can think of that I dislike about Africa and it is always self-inflicted: driving at night. 20-hour straight stints at the wheel of the Landy across Europe are no sweat but I’d rather do one of those every day for a week than spend 20 minutes driving in the dark here.  The sun has long dipped below the horizon and we still have a good three hours left to Karatu. The reasons behind my hatred of this are numerous: firstly, the dark is different here, it is an all-encompassing inky black, often with little moonlight and certainly no streetlamps or orange glow of distant cities. Secondly, pot holes big enough to smash your suspension and roll your car are just impossible to see after hours, particularly combined with the locals’ habit of not putting their headlights on for as long as possible and then using full-beam only, giving you mostly no idea that anything is coming towards you at all, and then rendering you completely blind for the time after you realize that it’s an overwide truck stonking it in the opposite direction. Also, African roads are used by cars, trucks, people, donkeys, cattle, bicycles being used to carry wardrobes, mopeds with cows slung across the handlebars, elephants and almost everything in-between.  Finally, Tanzania loves a speedbump, which always arrive unannounced and often for no reason at all, in the middle of a perfectly straight out of town A-road. These lead things getting very rough indeed with no warning, as I find when all four wheels leave the ground as we the 2 tons of Cruiser jumps out of a hidden drainage ditch. The whole thing is a guaranteed way to ruin an otherwise perfect equatorial evening.

It seems like forever but eventually we reach Karatu. It’s been a long, sweaty and tiring day and I haven’t slept for 38 hours due to my inability to snooze on planes. This doesn’t call for coffee, this calls for a Tusker. There is nothing more delicious than a well earned, ice-cold bottle of Kenyan Tusker beer after a long day driving across the African bush and this great brew is sold everywhere. Electing not to accompany said pint with ‘rat-on-stick’ as the first place offers, dinner is had sat on an upturned bucket at the side of the main road, where men and prostitutes meddle over pints of Guinness in the concrete bars and African football is shown on shaky TVs in the corner. Beef on a stick with re-cooked chips is the order of the day and it’s delicious, as is the Tusker. That was a big day. TIA, bru’.

Karatu is a pleasant little town, equipped with all the basics that one might need but with nothing of note to see. Rows of dusty shops and market stalls are set back from the metaled main-street, behind which thriving food-markets sell everything from delicious fruit and veg to not-so-tasty chewy dried fish. Around the little villages outside of the town, coffee plantations cover the hills. For me, there is nothing more wonderful than falling asleep on an African hilltop to a cacophony of cicadas and awakening to the crow of roosters as a cool, dewy dawn rises above a coffee plantation. And this morning is no exception. Rows of perfectly tended coffee plants line the hillside, recovering between last year’s harvest and the production of the upcoming crop. It’s always great to see where the coffee itself comes from, meeting the people who actually harvest the cherries with their hands and who make it their business to start the chain between this Tanzanian hillside to the London espresso cup in the best possible way. They absolutely love coffee and are proud of the fact that the stuff that they pick is some of the best in the world. I find it hugely rewarding to see the car that these people put in and it’s always great to see that they are well treated by the Estate owners and are content with the conditions in which they live and work. The pickers’ lives are wholly centered around the Estates, with their families living on the farm itself making the whole place into a community as well as a business. It is this personal connection that the growers and pickers have with the crop from the start of the coffee’s journey that makes me love the specialty coffee business and one which it’s great to be able to share with people who buy the roasted coffee wherever it may end up.  

We leave Karatu early on a Monday morning for Arusha and Moshi. Nestled at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro, these towns are legendary in the coffee world for the excellent coffee that goes through them. That said, a great deal of poor quality coffee is also produced here, so it’s not as easy as finding a producer and taking their crop to be of a high standard based purely on its geographic merit! Breakfast is had at the Arusha Coffee Lodge, which though touristy, serves some of the best homegrown, home roasted espresso that I’ve ever had. It’s a wonderfully smooth, fruity blend, not too acidic and with a very light layer of crema and I smash about 6 of them before bouncing off the walls all the way to the next meeting.

I plum the meeting address into the Sat Nav - gone are the days of exploring Africa on old paper maps drawn up by colonial cartographers - thanks to TomTom and Google, most of Africa is now navigable by a woman in the dashboard. Much as I do love a map, I must admit that more often than not it is its modern counterpart on which I depend for finding my way around towns. This morning, Dashboard Doris leads to one of the more interesting drives to a meeting. The muddy backstreets of Arusha are full of dogs, rickety tin-roofed houses and waiting Matatu minibuses which ply the roads all over East Africa. Banana palms form the verge as I lower the Land Cruiser into a river, its water lapping at the doors as I form a bow wave to cross. A lady carrying a headload of mangos is in no hurry in front of us, as we cross a disused railway line and pass a chalked advert on a mud wall which reads: Mechi Za Leo. Big Mechi. Hull Vs Man. City. Saa 11:00 Jioni. Africa loves football, and it is often much to the bewilderment of locals that I have absolutely no idea what’s happening with Manchester Rovers or Leeds Wednesday back home. Many then launch into lengthy explanations in pity, describing with huge knowledge what has befallen Cesc Fabregas’ right boot or how Mr. Rooney has been sold to a vivisectionist.  After another tight squeeze between goats, satellite dishes and yet more matatus, good old Doris gets me to the mill and roaster that I have come to see five minutes early. I feel that this is another small example of how Africa works, but it only works if you throw away 90% of the manner in which things work back home.

As it is the end of the rainy season, we sadly only have one glimpse of the wonderous Mount Kilimanjaro, one evening on the way back from yet another trip to the airport to try and track down our missing bags. Its permanently snowcapped square peak stands high and mighty above the clouds which surround its lower slopes, almost twenty-thousand feet above Africa. The soils in the surrounding area are also of volcanic origin and with Moshi and Arusha sitting higher in altitude than many European ski resorts, it is this mixed with the equatorial climate that makes the coffee here quite so wonderful. But also, it is the surrounding area which makes the search for coffee here so rewarding. The country and its people who make their living from the Tanzanian land are some of the most gentle, most welcoming and most knowledgeable people that I have ever met. Be it smallholders’ patches or Estates’ fields, the coffee plantations that produce the highest caliber crop in which we are interested are always tended with such care and perfection that it instills such confidence in the crop before one even tastes it. The whole chain of coffee production is operated with such genuine pride that it is no wonder that the result is some of Africa’s finest. I leave this part of Tanzania with a bag full of samples and with bags of excitement to come back and place orders, bringing the fruits of these people’s work to the roasteries and bring a little slice of the Tanzanian mountains into people’s morning routine back home. It’s a great place this. And the coffee that is produces is even greater.