A lovely lady toured us round and showed us what they had. I’d never seen cocoa beans growing before.
Or their famous Luwak coffee.
Or vanilla.
Luwaks are these adorable little animals used to make this coffee. I get the feeling that they may not be treated that well in the coffee farms, but I don’t actually know this for sure so I’m not gonna make any claims!
The process is pretty cool though. Luwaks eat only the best coffee beans, so only the best beans are in their droppings since they don’t swallow them whole.
They’re washed and cleaned and pealed one by one (so there’s no actual poo on there – don’t you worry).
They’re washed again after that, roasted for an hour with firewood until they turn brown and crushed.
They then sieve the beans to get the fine product.
It smelt good.
There was a great little selection of hot drinks – hot chocolate, teas and cofeee.
The ginger coffee and gingseng coffee were made from the Bali coffee, which was really strong. The ginger was really nice but the gingseng was everyone’s favourite, probably because it had sugar and cream in it. Sneaky.
The teas were all sweet, but the hot chocolate had no sugar in it so it was quite bitter.
They brought out some fried bananas as well, which was pretty vegimite on the table. People either loved it or hated it. I obviously loved it.
The lumak coffee cost US$5 to try, and they were all so nice (and I was very curious) so was happy to fork out a fiver.
I really liked it. I’m not going to pretend I’m a fucking coffee expert as I’m really not, but it had flavour. And I liked it. So there.
They even brought out a lumak for us to play with for a bit! Yay for lumak!
I did buy some sugar free green tea though. And a couple of bags of lumak coffee for my dinner party when I went back to London. God, such an international dinner party, no?
As soon as we arrived, all I saw were monkeys. Everywhere. We hadn’t even actually gone into the forest yet.
There were people selling bananas outside as well. Yeah, cause that’s exactly what I want, to attract more attention from the monkeys. I may as well ask a monkey to attack me.
All the monkeys were chowing down.
I actually saw a few fatties as well. I guess the monkeys are being very well-visited. I wanted some actual proof that I was there, so for a while, this was the closest I got.
I decided to stop being such a vagine and man up, so I made an new friend. I think he liked me.
Okay, monkeys weren’t so bad. Maybe I was being a little bit of a drama queen. But monkeys are scary as hell if you think about them coming towards you to attack! I was very pleased that this guy just wanted to hang out.
Luwaks, monkeys – I was just a little animal lover today. There was one thing I did discover though…
