Peruvian Coffee: Nick's Circle (Part 1 of 3)
Nick pulled a folded scrap of paper from an old hat on his kitchen table, and his whole future tilted toward Peruvian coffee before he even knew what the word meant. His parents had promised him a return ticket to anywhere in the world as a graduation present, and Nick, unable to choose, wrote ten country names on ten scraps and let chance decide. Peru came out. He had always wanted to see South America, so he laughed, folded the paper back up, and started saving.
That decision began weeks earlier, at the same corner café his group of friends had used since primary school. Barney, Fred, Clay, Betty, Wilma, and Nick had been meeting there every fortnight since they were eleven years old, first for milkshakes after swimming lessons, and later for coffee once they were old enough to pretend they liked the taste. With graduation only months away, the table felt different that afternoon. Somebody had ordered a plate of chips nobody touched, and the usual noise dropped a notch the moment Betty cleared her throat.
She announced she was off to university in the spring to train as a doctor, and the others cheered loud enough that the barista glanced over from behind the machine. Barney had already booked flights to Bali for himself, Fred, and Clay, a full month of beach days and late nights before real life caught up with them. Nick sat there, stirring his coffee long after it had gone cold and realized quietly that the group was about to scatter for the first time.
He said little about his own plans that afternoon, mostly because he didn't have any locked up yet. He wanted to travel. His family didn't really do beach holidays, and Sunday dinner was the fixed point of Nick's whole week. His mum cooked a roast most weeks; his dad carved it at the head of the table, and his two younger sisters argued over who got the last potato without fail. Nick loved his mates fiercely, but his family came first, and that had never once felt like a sacrifice to him. He couldn't remember a single Sunday he had missed.
…
When his parents sat him down the week after his final exam and slid an envelope across the table, Nick wasn't expecting a ticket. “Anywhere you want,” his dad said, sliding it further across the tablecloth. “You've earned it.” Nick thought about Bali for exactly one afternoon, pictured himself trailing behind Barney and the others, then thought about the old geography hat still sitting on the kitchen counter from a school assignment years earlier. He pulled out Peru instead, almost as a joke, and then found he couldn't put it back. His mates ribbed him for weeks after that. Nobody picks Peru by accident, they said, over and over. Nick just shrugged each time and said South America had always been the place he wanted to see, hat or no hat.
Since the ticket alone wouldn't cover three months on the road, Nick kept working nights and weekends at the Aldi on Albert Street in Geelong West, the coastal city that sits about 75 km southwest of Melbourne, down toward the Bellarine Peninsula and the start of the Great Ocean Road. Six months of stacking shelves became eight. Every extra shift meant a few more days on the ground in Peru. He started reading everything he could find about the place during his breaks until the checkout staff started calling him the Professor.
Two nights before Nick flew out from Melbourne International Airport, all five friends met at the same café one last time, and for once nobody rushed through their coffee. Clay proposed a toast with his flat white raised like a champagne glass, something about the group surviving high school, families, and each other.
This got a proper laugh out of everyone, including the barista, who had clearly heard enough of their history by now to feel like an honorary member. Fred slid a folded map of South America across the table, covered in his own terrible handwriting marking every place he thought Nick should visit, most of which Nick had no intention of seeing but appreciated the effort deeply.
Betty hugged him longest at the end and told him quietly that whatever happened over there, he should write it all down. It sounded like exactly the sort of thing people forgot the details of if they didn't.
…
The whole family drove Nick to the airport. Mum parked in the drop-off lane, and everyone climbed out to help with his bags. Her eyes were wet; the tears a mother gets when she watches her child step out the door for good. Dad pressed a bank card into his hand. Five hundred Australian dollars, just in case. "For emergencies," he said.
Nick checked his tickets one more time. Melbourne to Santiago on LA804. Santiago to Lima’s Jorge Chavez Int. Airport on flight LA604. He read the flight numbers twice, as if saying them would make the trip more real. This was real now.
By the time he landed in Lima, ninety days felt both endless and nowhere near enough. Grey skies and thick traffic greeted him at the airport.
He found his hostel in Barranco, the artsy seaside quarter that also happens to be the best place in the city to drink fresh Peruvian coffee, all cobblestone streets and murals and buskers playing guitar late into the evening. Barranco sits a short ride from San Isidro, Lima's business district and home to most of the city's foreign embassies.
The hostel in Barranco ran on a loose rhythm of shared kitchens and late arrivals, backpackers drifting in from all directions with stories that blurred together after the third or fourth telling. Nick's roommate for the week was a Canadian named Josh, who had lived in Lima long enough to know the best and cheapest places to eat.
“Trust me,” Josh had said, already halfway out the hostel door dragging Nick on his fourth night for a Canada Day reception. Nick went for the free food, expecting nothing more than a plate of sandwiches and an early night. He found Marisol instead.
…
Marisol was twenty-four, sharp, educated, and easy to talk to. She worked for an agricultural trade group and spoke better English than Nick spoke Spanish, which he found both impressive and mildly humbling. Her family grew cocoa and coffee in the high jungle, three generations of them, and when Nick mentioned the coffee he'd tasted that morning, her whole face changed. They talked for two hours by the drinks table and never touched the maple cookies or a Nanaimo bar.
She told him about her grandfather's farm, about drying beds and shade trees and the bitter taste of a cherry straight off the branch, her hands moving as she spoke like she was still standing among the trees.
Nick, buzzing with two hours of good coffee talk and something else he couldn't quite name yet, told her about the plan already forming in his head: a brand, an export business, something to help farmers like her family. Something flickered across Marisol's face at that, quick enough that Nick almost missed it, and her smile turned careful. “You should see it first,” she said. “Before you decide what anyone needs.” Nick didn't understand the warning yet, but he wrote it down on his phone anyway, right underneath the beginnings of his business plan.
They swapped numbers before the reception wound down, and over the following week they met twice more for coffee near the sea. Marisol laughed at his terrible Spanish more than once, correcting his verb tenses between sips. Nick noticed he was choosing his shirts more carefully than usual, ironing things he had never bothered to iron before. Something had started between them, quiet and warm, and both knew it, even if neither said so out loud just yet.
…
Back home, Sunday dinners continued without him, and his mum sent photos of the empty chair at the table most weeks, a running joke that had started half serious and never quite stopped. His dad texted him articles about coffee farming he had clearly found through a determined late-night search, each one slightly less relevant than the last, and Nick appreciated every single one anyway. His sisters argued that his seat should go to whoever finished their vegetables first, and Nick argued back from the far side of the world that the rule had always been first come, first served, coffee trip or not.
Sitting at BuenaVista Café, Malecón de la Marina 316, Miraflores, Lima, Nick is homesick.
Over their WhatsApp group chat, Barney sent him a photo from a Bali beach with the caption “wish you were here, mate.” Nick answered with a photo of ceviche and the Pacific ocean in the background, and the caption “no you don't.” Betty, buried in her third semester of anatomy, wrote back less often but always asked real questions when she did, the kind that made Nick think harder about what he was doing over there instead of just enjoying the ride. He had told none of them about Marisol yet. Some things, he figured, were still too new to hand over to a group chat that had known him since he was eleven.
…
Over their second coffee, Marisol mentioned a name that made the server glance up without meaning to. Don Aurelio Vargas, a regional official who signed permits, she said, for mines and logging on land that was never his to hand out. “People like him wait for farmers to get desperate,” she told Nick, stirring her cup slowly. “Then they buy their desperation.” Nick wrote the name in his phone beside his half-formed business plan and still didn't understand it. He would, soon enough, though neither of them knew that yet.
Marisol couldn't join him for the next leg of the trip. Work held her in Lima, so she made a call on his behalf, arranged a guide, and told him to text her the moment he had signal again. At the bus station, with his pack already on his shoulders, she squeezed his hand a beat longer than a friend would. Nick carried that all the way east, through two days of buses and one small plane, toward a river he had only ever seen on a map, his stomach doing something complicated that had nothing to do with the altitude.
Nick had never really thought of himself as someone who noticed details. Yet Peru seemed determined to change that about him, too. He noticed the exact shade of blue the sky turned right before Lima's fog rolled in each evening, and the particular way street vendors called out their fruit, and the fact that his hostel's ancient kettle took exactly four minutes to boil no matter how many times he willed it to go faster. Small things, all of them, but they added up into a version of paying attention he hadn't really practised back home, where every day mostly looked like the one before it.
…
The Amazon is a giant with humble beginnings. Its headwaters trace back to high, cold streams in the southern Peruvian Andes. From there the water pushes east across Peru, then flows into Colombia and Brazil before it finally empties into the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of kilometres from where it starts as barely a trickle. Nick would ride only the smallest stretch of it. Yet, that stretch was waiting to change him completely, along with a man named Samuel who was about to teach him the one lesson none of his plans had room for.
Nick reached the river town of Atalaya footsore and tired, sweating under his pack after the two-kilometre walk from the tiny Teniente General Gerardo Pérez Pinedo Airport.
Wilmer waited at the dock with the patience of a man who had made this exact run more times than he could easily count, chewing on a stalk of grass and watching the sky for signs of rain. He'd already loaded the canoe with fuel drums and sacks of rice. He greeted Nick with a nod rather than a handshake. It's the greeting that assumed they'd have plenty of time to talk once the canoe was actually moving.
As the outboard motor coughed to life and the current took hold, the jungle closed around them like a green wall, and Nick understood, for the first time since pulling that scrap of paper from the hat, exactly how far from home he really was.
- end of Part One -
