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" This is the seventh part in a series of dispatches from Esquire&amp;#039;s coffee correspondent. HAITI \u2014 The one good thing about sleeping under your truck at altitude is the mosquitoes \u2014 it seems they don&amp;#039;t care for altitude. Either that or they don&amp;#039;t like trucks. The rest of it isn&amp;#039;t as fun as it sounds \u2014 I&amp;#039;m in the mountains of Haiti. It&amp;#039;s dawn and I&amp;#039;m up and worried. Have I gone too far? Is this like those expeditions (Everest comes to mind) where promises are made not to push the limits, and then when the moment comes, those limits are ignored? Will this be painful? Will there be an &amp;quot;I should have listened to my gut&amp;quot; reckoning while being tended to by my wife? When the first picker saw me, you might have thought she had seen a ghost. Predictably, she fled. Soon she returned with others, both angry and afraid. By then I had retrieved my professional-looking camera and was taking pictures of coffee, oranges, flowers, anything. It struck me as the best thing to do to appear tame. But it may have made matters worse \u2014 it&amp;#039;s hard to say, because things got worse anyway. More people were fetched, there was screaming (mostly heated debate between them), sweat on brows, pushing, pointing, and general mayhem. Was I there to give them cholera? But that was many hours ago. Now I&amp;#039;m slowly rolling down the mountain, my truck filled to the brim with passengers, including four boys on the hood. We&amp;#039;re following a ragtag group of donkeys and their load of coffee cherries. My wife&amp;#039;s most recent record is playing loudly on my CD player, and everyone seems delighted and impressed that I am married to such an angel. Her voice is both calming and heartbreaking.  I am told time and time again that below is the processing co-operative, and that down there we will have the best coffee in Haiti. Through a mixture of French, Creole, and hand gestures, I am told that down there, I will find what I am looking for. In the village, we pass like a spectacle, a procession of donkeys and pickers and a truck driven by some strange looking blanc. Out of the truck I pass through a gate and what I find I simply can&amp;#039;t believe: a coffee-drying platform and sacs of bean \u2014 real bean. And it is glorious. Todd Carmichael is the co-founder of La Colombe Torrefaction and the first American to cross Antarctica to the South Pole alone on foot. Follow his progress via Geo Tracker/Google Earth. Read more from Todd Carmichael&amp;#039;s regular coffee column &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/a9232/haiti-coffee-plants-011411/>