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forests that surround Salento . Ocaso , a boutique coffee growing farm produces some of the regions , and if not the worlds , best coffee . It ’ s a story that needs to be told , but not for now , we ’ ll discover it later ( Traverse issue 42 , June 14 , 2024 ). The ride on soon took us to another producer of beans , another that is close to my heart and closer to my stomach .
Colombia has some of the finest chocolate anywhere on the planet and here we were amongst some of the finest of that , Xué Chocolate Artesanal , nothing more than a roadside stop .
Amongst what amounted to a tin shed and ramshackle gardens came an immediate explanation of chocolate production , trees across the road , amongst the jungle carried the fruit that we were told were cacao something that the peoples of antiquity have been consuming , and worshipping , in South and Central America for millennia . The Mayans of Mexico were drinking the product for almost three thousand years whilst the Aztec believed it was a gift from the gods , and who could disagree ? Such reveration saw the brown bean worshipped like modern consumers worship a plastic card , cacao beans were treated as a tradable commodity the same as cash in our world .
Ride anywhere in Colombia and you ’ ll witness cacao beans spread roadside , in fields , or laid out on a table drying in the sun , you see cacao has become an important commodity in modern Colombia as the nation tries to fight back from the ravages of recent coca farming . Similar sounding words in English , similar addictive properties , hugely different lifestyle outcomes .
Peace deals brokered internally within Colombia have seen government forces make head way into cutting back on coca farming and entice regional enterprises to concentrate on cacao , and who could
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