The municipality of Ilopolis is tightly nestled away in a high mountainous valley lined with so much native yerba mate trees on its slopes that farmers hardly require planting to sustain their production. On the valley floor far in the distance I spotted the small town, street lights already burning in the twilight of the early evening. The bus dropped me then and there, so I called Clovis who had invited me to Ilopolis at the yerba mate congress in Uruguay a few weeks earlier. Clovis answered... "I'm on way. 25 minutes", he responded. Over the following week I would be the first African guest of the district of Ilopolis, the region with the highest concentration of inhabitants living off of the yerba mate trade.

I had also met Ariana, municipal secretary of culture and tourism . She arranged for me to visit two primary schools in the region. The dream job of most of these kids was to make yerba mate, which left me with an overwhelming sense of confidence for the future of high quality yerba mate production. A group of about 40 children between the ages of 8 and 14 gathered in a classroom to meet the African visitor. I had a short talk with them about the animals in Africa and how our schools work. These kids were surprisingly knowledgeable about yerba mate cultivation and when I realised that is was an agricultural school I asked the children whose parents work with yerba mate to raise their hands. Here's the video of their response: VIDEO. 

On the night that I had arrived, Clovis and I dashed out of the cold into a little diner where we met Eduardo who runs a more-than-organic operation with 60 other growers in the region. A few days later I went to visit his little part of the jungle, which he had given a second chance at life. Many dozens of millions of hectares of jungle in Brazil had been devastated 60 years earlier leaving nothing but desert where there had once been thick jungle . Eduardo has been allowing the jungle to return for more than half of his life. His method is patiently allowing nature to heal itself. Today his 20 odd hectares of jungle has been in recuperation for 50 years and yielding some yummy yerba mate. This ancient philosophy of working in harmony with nature is very rare to find in any part of the world, so I asked Eduardo why he worked this way. His response was, " when I used to make yerba mate the conventional way, the taste of the final product was never satisfactory, so I escaped from that world." Here's a short video of Eduardo taking me into the bush: VIDEO
  
There was clearly enough demand for everyone to make a good living off of the trade and despite the fact that all of everybody's neighbours were in theory, business rivals, everyone got along like family. Breakfast, lunch and supper was eaten as whoever's house was closest and yerba mate tours were arranged with farmers at the moment of bumping into them in town or elsewhere. The days were spent learning how to tell good yerba from bad yerba, and I took a particular interest in doing tastings of all forms of the product from a variety of different sources. The nights were freezing, so we often spent hours by the cast iron stove grilling pinões (a type of large pine nut native to the area), drinking what they called, "colonial wine" (home-made wine) and there was a lot of meat.

 Making Charred Pinões in the Bush: VIDEO PLAYLIST