Coban really isn't the most interesting of towns, it doesn't have anything special to recommend itself but it does have a few interesting things around it. So we decided not to bother exploring the town and headed straight for the coffee finca to see where coffee is grown, picked and prepared. It is quite a small one (3 acres) but was really interesting. We also met up with 3 lovely people from the hostel who came on the tour with us (Nancy, Mathew and Jeremy), who are cycling around the Americas but started in Canada 7 months ago!!

Our guide, carmen, spoke perfect english and explain about all the different kinds of coffee they had. She showed us where the seeds are picked, by who and explained where they are exported and what stays with them *i.e the good stuff stays with them!!(. She showed us where they are de-shelled, washed sorted into good and bad (good sinks, bad floats). She also took us to where they are dried, roasted and packaged. It was really quite cool! After the tour, she gave us all a cup of coffee to test (very nice but I still started shaking!).

After a very yummy lunch (who new chips could taste so good!!), we took a long and very hot walk about of town to the orchid farm...28,000 types of orchid apparently and some of them are really bizarre. Appreciation of flowers must be something that comes with age because we actually found this quite interesting! Juan, the guy who showed us around the farm was really sweet and was obviously really really enthusiastic about his flowers. We also got the impression that him and his wife are a rather rich couple who just have a slightly strange obsession for orchids and just decided to start making a little money out of it. I thought orchids only lasted about a week but some of them had been going for 20 years or more!!

Altogether it was a very informative day!

That evening we had to go hunting for some dinner...this hunt is getting very frustrating. Sometimes I think that it would be easier to forage for our food in the forest than to find somewhere that has decent food, for a decent price and has something other than chicken and b*****y beans on the menu!

However, the night ended with the most amazing shower that I have had since leaving the cruise...i.e. it was hot, strong and clean. It is amazing how such small things become so important. Good showers and feeling totally clean seem so be a bit like gold dust! So we were very happy as we went to bed feeling very clean, warm and cosy.