Pleiku and Coffee...

12//11

After a long day of recovery I met up with Hong Anh, a friend from Pleiku (Central Highlands).  She had some business that she was attending to in Saigon and during her off hours we hung out.  She invited me to go to her home town when she returned so I went back with her and had a very nice couple of days there.  While in Pleiku Anh was able to arrange for me to shoot at a coffee plantation which was great luck since the harvest was at it's end.  She convinced this one plantation to hold off harvesting the last few plants until we got there.  Literally we drove past hundreds of thousands of plants with not a berry of them until we came to three plants that were loaded with berries.  There was a small group of about 10 people just standing around waiting for us to get there so they could finish the harvest.   

Do you remember those ads for Columbian Coffee featuring JuanValdez with his burro meandering through the fields "picking only the ripe berries at there peak"?...  Well I can tell you, that is not the way it works around here. They wait for the entire plant to be ripe and then they attack it with such intensity that it's more like watching the cartoon virsion of a tazmanian devil.  There is nothing slow about what these pickers do. Berries were flying off these plants.  It was everything I could do to get them to slow down enough for me to make sense out of the photography.  Even at that, they had cleared the last remaining coffee from the plants in such sort order I didn't really feel like I had gotten the shots that I was looking for.  Oh well... there's always next year.

Christmas was nice, I was invited to have dinner at Anhs' house.

After just a few short days it was time to go back to Saigon and catch the bus for Cambodia.