The Amazing Race 36, Episode 3

Puerto Vallarta (Mexico) - Medellín (Colombia) - Guatapé (Colombia)

This week’s episode of The Amazing Race 36 was set in and around Guatapé, a tourism-dominated town that’s a popular excursion or weekend getaway from the city of Medellín, two hours away by bus.

The marquee attraction in Guatapé is “El Peñón de Guatapé”, an isolated vertical-sided rock 200 meters (650 feet) high, with a stairway built up one side to a viewing platform on top. At least one of the racers was afraid of heights, but perhaps they should have been as worried about being immediately below the rock (and without hardhats!) as of being on top of it. In November 2023, a year after this season of The Amazing Race was filmed, a landslide onto the path around the base of the rock injured 17 tourists.

The town of Guatapé is on the shore of a large reservoir behind a dam built for water storage and hydroelectric power for the Medellín region, which the racers — like many visitors — explored by boat. The decision to build the dam, which required relocating an entire town (only the cross on top of the steeple of the largest church, featured in this travelogue by a Colombian YouTuber, remains visible above the water of the reservoir), was controversial. But like many such human-made lakes, the reservoir has become a major recreational site.

Coffee is Colombia’s second-largest cash crop and source of employment and export revenues after cocaine. This leg of the race ended at a coffee hacienda (“finca”) where one member of each pair of racers had to pick and hull enough ripe coffee cherries to produce a kilogram of raw coffee beans.

For most tourists, coffee tourism has more to do with the lives of plantation owners than with the labor of coffee pickers.

When we think about labor-intensive farm work, the first things that come to mind are likely to be cotton, sugar cane, and rice. But today cotton can be picked, sugar cane can be cut, and rice can be transplanted by machine (or seeded directly in paddies without transplanting).

Coffee, tea, and cocoa, however, can’t be produced without large numbers of field workers. Cocoa harvesting involves cutting the large pods off the tree with a machete, and then slicing them open to extract the beans. So far as I can tell, those processes haven’t been automated. Coffee berries and tea leaves can be picked by machine, but (1) picking machinery is harder to use on the steep slopes where these crops grow best, and (2) because not all the coffee cherries or tea leaves on a bush are ready to be picked at the same time, mechanized picking inevitably results in less-than-optimal timing. The highest quality coffee and tea is picked by hand, returning to each bush several times during the ripening season to select the cherries or leaves that are ready to be picked.

Whether we live in a country where people drink more coffee or more tea, we probably don’t think much about how it is grown. “I’ve never seen a coffee plant,” one of the racers said, while another noted that, “I’ve never heard of a coffee cherry”. As yet another of the racers, Kishori, observed:

That was a hard job. I have so much respect for the people that do this. We eat food, we just see it on our plate, but we don’t actually appreciate where it comes from sometimes. That kinds of puts things in perspective, like how much hard effort actually goes into putting it on your plate.

Props to the producers of The Amazing Race for giving racers and viewers a glimpse of field work in the coffee country.

Stay tuned for the next episode, when I’ll have more to say about Medellín.