Oso Negro Coffee

My Summer Vacation [Uganda and Indonesia]

by Bob Fulmer, Royal Coffee, Inc., Green Coffee Importers, San
Francisco

Part One

What a long strange trip it's been. We arrived home last Tuesday,
suffering severe sleep deprivation. It went
SF-NY-London-Brussels-Kampala-Nairobi-Bombay-Singapore- Jakarta-Ujung
Pandang-Denpasar-Delhi-Denpasar-Singapore-Tokyo-SF. Fifteen flights in
eighteen days.... Six of the eighteen days involved days of driving more
than seven hours....

Back in 1978 Pete and I had a dream. That was to carry an inventory of
the best coffees from every country of origin. This trip was the
beginning of putting the finishing touches on what has been an eighteen
year journey. We have a few more to go: Cameroon? Outer Zalgainia?? This
trip brought two more origins into the fold: Uganda and Timor, and laid
the groundwork for rehabilitating a third: Sulawesi [Celebes].

UGANDA

Shucks, the stop over in Bujumbura, Burundi has been canceled. An
economic boycott went into place over the weekend. Everyone's hoping the
Hutu versus Tutsi carnage will not resume. Belgium's Sabena airlines has
a daily flight to Kampala. Our DC-10 is mostly empty, which makes for a
comfortable flight, but also contributes to a slight apprehension as to
what waits upstream. We arrive in Entebbe around 10 p.m.-I love places
where you deplane directly onto the tarmac. Warm, moist, smoky third
world air. Idi Amin tried his best to kill this place. The new plague is
AIDS. A lot of people are infected. "Don't Despair-Live With
Dignity"-the first billboard we see leaving the airport. We share a cab
with a young republican U.S. AID consultant who is here helping to set
up a stock exchange. Four companies will be listed, including the
government coffee board. 51% is being offered for sale. This is your
chance to get in at ground zero. Privatization. This is the consultant's
second visit. He says there are a lot of bars, coffin makers, and
prostitutes in Kampala. He doesn't drink coffee. Can he be trusted? I
think not.

11:30 p.m. Deeply into the interior now, we check into the Kampala
Sheraton. There is a great African rock and roll band playing "Congo
Rock" on the dance floor. Helen is impressive on the dance floor, as
usual. I am, as usual, extraordinarily white, but a gamer. Max is
dancing with a man in a dashiki. The Indian food is good. The Ugandan
beer is cold. It doesn't get much better than this. And in Uganda, it
probably doesn't.

Day 2. Today we met the Kyagalanyi people. Paul Mugambwa is the
chairman. An former civil servant and coffee liquorer for the government
board who survived the "years of destruction." He now owns 20% of the
country's largest exporting company. His business manager and partner in
many ventures is Olle Otteby, an expatriated Swedish accountant. "Too
bad you weren't here yesterday; you could have visited our island." Paul
and Olle have recently diversified: $20,000 for the island in Lake
Victoria, $100,000 for the 25 cabin Steamship-yes, a la the African
Queen-and $80,000 went into a 500 acre coffee farm. Olle: "These
investments are risky. But I'm 46 years old. In Sweden I'm an
accountant. Here I'm alive." Sounds good to me. In the afternoon, Sarah,
a young cupper and quality controller at the mill here in Kampala, sets
up a cupping and a tour of the mill. Mostly it's robusta. Say 90% of
Uganda's production is robusta. I have a confession to make... I like a
good robusta... a lot...so shoot me. Sarah's a nice lady-she's also got
coffee running in her veins.

Day 3. 7 a.m. Paul is waiting out front in the land rover. We are going
to Mbale. Five hours up, five hours back. Piece of cake, right Max?...
Max? It's not child abuse, it's good for him. The African sunrise famous
and for good reason. Directly into the red ball, we head east towards
Kenya, the single lane road all to ourselves in the early light. A lot
of barefoot pedestrians and a lot of bicycles. The local economy rides
on bikes. Huge 80 lb. bunches of matooke, the banana which is the
dietary staple, and 15 gallon stainless steel milk containers are being
hauled on bikes up hills for great distances. It is an awesome display
of strength. It also indicates how far Uganda, Winston Churchill's
"Pearl of Africa," has been left behind. Around 10 a.m. we passed the
source of the Nile, where the great river flows out of Lake Victoria.
The lake has been invaded by the water hyacinth, a horribly successful
ornamental garden pond plant that is choking the life out of the lake
clogging the hydro-electric plant at Owens Dam. We see crews dredging
around the base of the dam-a truly Sisyphusian task. At noon we hit the
coffee town of Mbala. Kyagalanyi bought an old railroad station here and
it makes a charming warehouse. More charming is Olive. She is the woman
in charge of Mbale. This is where the Bugisu arabicas are from; on the
west side of Mt. Elgon. The Kenya border runs right down the middle of
the mountain. During the recent past, low government prices encouraged
smuggling and a lot of tourist coffee sailed the lake for Kenya. During
the coffee season, "middlemen" (we saw mostly women) buy parchment in
the mountains and bring it to Mbale to sell. Every day they show up at
the mills. Olive has a moisture tester and if the coffee is too wet she
lets the middlemen dry it some more on the old train platform. But no
cash changes hands until it is dry. She also cups, which is the
exception, not the rule, in selling, not drinking. It's a cash crop
grown in between food crops. Ugandans are tea drinkers. No electricity,
no plumbing, and organic by default. My experience with Bugisu coffee is
limited to one container we bought in '94. It was good. The coffee I
bought here is good and when the main crop comes in , in a couple of
months, it should be even better. Bugisu should be a household name. I
think it will soon be, and I hope you all help give it a little push.

Idi Amin and the government monopoly are in the past, but Uganda is a
land-locked nation and that will always be a disadvantage. Kyagalanyi
has been selling all their coffee ex-Kampala, which means the buyer must
get it to the boat in Mombasa or Dar es Salaam, at his risk, which is
considerable. All along the way shipments are fair game for coffee
poachers. Big hits are taken but this is a cost of business.

7 p.m. Back in Kampala. Didn't sleep last night. Probably won't sleep
tonight. Oh well...CNN goes all night and we find it so fascination.
Tomorrow, Paul has generously offered us his driver. The Queen Elizabeth
National Park is only seven hours away. Besides killing 300,000 people,
stealing $1.5 billion in property and torturing thousands, Idi Amin also
allowed his army to machine-gun the animals in the National Parks. What
a guy. It's not fair, but he's alive in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, dreaming of
a political comeback. The parks are being restored. We saw elephants,
hippos, sitatungas, and a variety of other beasts. Lions are being
seen...I'm told...secretly... at night. We also, surprisingly, saw some
tourists. The most exciting to do of course is to view the gorillas in
the Impenetrable Forest. But you must reserve two years in advance and
only six people are allowed in at a time. Maybe next time. Big day
tomorrow...seven hours back to Kampala, close the deal with Paul and
Olle, say goodbye, and off to Bombay via Nairobi.

Day 5. The longest day ever. At 6 a.m. the generator fired up and the
lights came on while I was in the shower, about a stone's throw from the
Zaire border. It's now 3 a.m. and we've just discovered the mini-bar in
Bombay. Max and I can't believe our good fortune. The hotel has ESPN and
the Raiders-Falcons game is just starting. And, we've got 22 hours here
before heading for Toraja.

Read Part Two