Organic Coffee, El Valle

We have a special treat here in El Valle: a small tostaderia (coffee roaster) which specializes in organic coffee. The tostaderia is owned and run by Francoise and Jose, a Canadian/Panamanian couple. They make excursions throughout the country to source their coffee beans. Each batch of beans has an interesting journey; for example, the last bag I bought made this trek: Jose called someone in a small village in the Ngobe Bugle comarca (way west and north from here...towards Costa Rica), where they had previously visited and approved the coffee. The phone answerer took a message and a couple of days later, the "chefe" called Jose, who ordered four five-hundred pound sacks of coffee. Once the coffee beans had been picked and bagged, the sacks were loaded onto donkeys who make the trek through the jungle until reaching a road where there was a 4-wheel drive jeep. The sacks were taken, by the jeep, down to the Pan American Highway, where they were transferred to one of the buses which run up and down the highway. The bus got the coffee beans as far as the turn up to El Valle (28 km down the mountain), where Jose was waiting with his car to transport the beans up the mountain to El Valle.
It is not often you get to hear about your food origins! And it is yummy coffee, too!