The Coffee Robbery of the Century

If you order a cup of Nicaraguan coffee in your town, there is a good chance that the beans used in preparing your drink will be from one of the fincas around Jinotega or Matagalpa.  After all, this is a premier region for the renowned and much-sought shade-grown Nicaraguan coffee.  […]

The Shadowy Business of Nicaraguan Coffee

On our second day at El Soccorro, at breakfast, we planned to ask our host, Edgar, if he could give us a coffee tour of his finca or recommend any other coffee tours in the area.  But it turned out, we did not even have to ask.  Edgar was super […]

Coffee: In Love and War

Several years ago, a coffee shop by my office had seasonal Nicaraguan coffee beans for sale. Coffee bags with big letters NICARAGUA had an image of a man in a blue shirt holding a basket of ripe coffee cherries. The name of the coffee was “Don Zeledon”, and the coffee […]

Somoto Canyon: The River Runs Through It

Start with Part I here In the last post, I left off just as we just reached the bottom of the Somoto Canyon and, incidentally, the Nicaraguan border with Honduras.  As it turns out, the Rio Coco River which runs through Somoto Canyon divides Hondurans and Nicaragua along most of […]

Somoto Canyon: The What, the Why, and the How

We were eating breakfast in our Granada Airbnb, the standard affair of rice, beans, eggs, and plantains, when Victor loudly snickered and put down the book he had been leafing through.  It was an old torn-up Nicaraguan guidebook he found on the bookshelf among poetry books by Ruben Dario and […]

Cambodia and Thailand – Us vs. Monkeys of the World

By Julia / February 21, 2019

Everywhere in Cambodia, whether it’s the temples of Angkor, the caves of Kampot, or the countryside of Battambang, if you see tourists gathering with cameras while the locals are rolling their eyes, it can only mean one thing – monkeys.  Macaques are cute and photogenic.  They are also vicious assholes […]

Cambodia – How to Cross the Street and Live

By Julia / February 19, 2019

On our first morning in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, we were standing on the corner of a busy intersection, unsure of how to cross.  The interweaving flow of scooters, bicycles, motorcycles, cars, tuk-tuks, and occasional trucks never slowed and never stopped.   There were no marked lanes, they didn’t […]

Cambodia – Cooking Class, Insects, and Vegetarians

By Victor / February 17, 2019

To avoid being “templed out”, we split our three-day Angkor Wat pass into four days.  Two days of temple visits, one day of rest, and the last day of temple visits again.  On the day of rest, we decided to take a Cambodian cooking class that included a market visit […]

Cambodia – Table Manners

By Julia / February 16, 2019

A week after traveling Cambodia and trying every Cambodian dish we found (except fertilized boiled eggs, we could not bring ourselves to eat duck embryo in an eggshell), I suddenly looked around and asked, “Why do all restaurants have forks and spoons on the tables, in addition to chopsticks?  This […]

Cambodia – Highlights

By Victor / February 14, 2019

We didn’t know what to expect from Cambodia.  We haven’t met other travelers who have been to Cambodia (outside of Seam Reap) and didn’t know what to prepare ourselves for.  Was it going to be just like Thailand and we would spend two weeks in a perpetual state of deja […]

Cambodia – The Way We Travel

By Julia / February 13, 2019

I was lounging in a round wicker chair in a pretty courtyard of our little guesthouse in the middle of Seam Reap, chatting with our charming young hostess, Fara. “So, where are you going after this?” asked Fara, with only slight traces of a Cambodian accent in her fluent English. […]

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