Like all good explorers, we start our journey by getting lost.

Charlotte B. Teagle/Staff (ENLARGE)

Mango ice pop is mixed, poured into a cup and ready for freezing at Lottafrutta where owner Myrna Perez makes Mexican ice pops.

Charlotte B. Teagle/Staff (ENLARGE)

Ice pops made by owner Myrna Perez form a cheery lineup in the freezer at LottaFrutta in the Old Fourth Ward.

JENNIFER ZYMAN/Special (ENLARGE)

Three of the members of the coolly enthusiastic Paleta Posse Ñ John Kessler (from left), Myrna Perez and Nick Marino Ñ peruse the offerings at Bambi Paleteria in Smyrna.

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Not 20 years in the Aegean Sea lost, but 45 minutes on the Southside, driving through scenery that changes block by block from ranch-house suburb to quaint Southern town to multi-culti shopping arena.

Our quest is to locate La Estrella de Michoacan, a tiny shop ensconced in a hulking strip mall, where Irma Heredia handcrafts Mexican-style ice pops from fresh fruit, nuts, cream, cucumbers, pure vanilla, chiles, rice and all kinds of surprising ingredients.

This would be our small group's first stop on a day spent circumnavigating Atlanta in pursuit of the rich culture of ice pops that Latin American immigrants have brought to this city. During this odyssey on a stick, we would sample flavors that sing with ripe pineapple, seduce with dulce de leche and sting with hot pepper.

These treats are called paletas in Spanish, which literally means "trowel" (a reference to the shape), but the name proves fitting. By the time we bite into our 50th paleta that evening, we have been shoveling — joyfully — all day.

The Paleta Posse, of which I am the founding member and secretary, consists of:

• Jennifer Zyman: A peripatetic local food blogger and writer who calls herself "the Blissful Glutton" (www.blissfulglutton.blogspot

.com). She is also Mexican and can translate Spanish and speak with authority about the flavors of superlative coconut and tamarind.

• Nick Marino: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's former music critic and possessor of a reliably bottomless pit. He also has opinions about everything.

• Myrna Perez: Our resident paleta expert, Perez owns a quirky shop in the Old Fourth Ward called LottaFrutta where she sells sandwiches, Mexican fruit cups and — yes — her own unorthodox version of the paleta. Perez wears black hospital scrubs embroidered with the word "Fruitologist" and grew up in a Texas border town, where her childhood treat was a trip across the border for a cucumber pop.

This cucumber pop — chunks of the crushed vegetable seasoned with hot red pepper and salt before being frozen on a stick — is at the top of Perez's wish list as we tumble into La Estrella de Michoacan's Spartan storefront. The name of the shop means "the Star of Michoacan," which is the Pacific-side Mexican state most associated with ice cream and paletas. It is an unsaid convention that nearly all paleta shops in Mexico and the United States reference Michoacan in their names.

It is also the home of Irma Heredia, who will come out from behind her bank of freezer cases to point out her hometown on a map. Unless you know Spanish, you will spend a lot of time pointing: Neither Heredia nor her assistant Alejandra Casteñeda Gonzalez speaks any English.

Lucky for us, both Zyman and Perez exclaim with delight in Spanish as Casteñeda Gonzalez explains the contents of the freezer cases.

One case holds two dozen varieties of "paletas de agua" — "water pops" made with little more than fresh fruit, water and sugar. Another holds an equal number of "paletas de leche" or "milk pops" that are essentially ice cream on a stick. Elsewhere are "esquimales" ("Eskimos" or chocolate-covered milk pops), a few flavors of ice cream and gorgeous "aguas frescas" —punches in which chunks of fruit and ice cubes bob.

"¡Pepino con chile!" Perez exclaims suddenly. "¡Me encanta!" She has found her cucumber ice pop, and it may be the most weirdly delicious thing on earth — hot with chile, sour with lime juice and salty. You bite, and it bites back.

"Oh, my God, this is ... sexy," Marino says of a silken vanilla pop studded with hard-frozen raisins. They work to glue your mouth shut, holding the melting cream in place.

"Mmmm, this is my favorite," Zyman says of a cinnamon-tinged rice pudding pop, its topography of short-grained rice becoming more apparent with each swipe of her tongue.

As secretary, I am busy trying each variety and taking notes. I naturally gravitate to the clean flavors of fruit pops made with lime, tamarind and cantaloupe on this hot day. But the cajeta (goat milk caramel) with toasted almonds is a knockout, and the chongo (Mexican bread pudding with farmer cheese) is intrigue on a stick. Speaking of intrigue, we apparently just missed avocado.

Heredia invites us back behind a plywood partition to see the small kitchen. Amid crates of fresh mango and pineapple ripening on shelves lies a stainless steel contraption about the size of a pingpong table. Or perhaps a farmyard trough, as it is filled with a viscous, murky liquid in which 15 dozen paletas hang suspended in stainless molds, their sticks pointing skyward. The liquid circulates around the molds. On one side of the machine, a whirring fan belt rotates a tub of ice cream. The liquid, Heredia explains, is propylene glycol, which is a moisturizer and humectant used in many cosmetics and hygiene products, notably personal lubricant.

Yes, it's a vat of lube. But, as it turns out, propylene glycol is just what the fruitologist ordered. It doesn't solidify until minus 76 Farenheit, so the below-freezing liquid can set the pops in 15 minutes. This method produces that gorgeous crystalline structure that is essential to the paleta — its fine ice crystals parallel across the body of the pop, lined up like baguette diamonds, strong enough for licks but yielding to bites.

We leave, each of us vowing to return with an ice chest.

Smyrna sensation

Our next stop, Bambi Paleteria, is clear across town in Smyrna. Unlike La Estrella de Michoacan's bare-bones demeanor, this is a pop shop that, well, pops.

Colorful decals cover the store window with electric-hued drawings of paletas, and there are enough stuffed and drawn deer to warm the hearts of kids and Disney lawyers everywhere. Cheerful orange paint covers the cinder-block walls, and a clean booth hugs a ray of sun coming through the window.

Open for five months, Bambi Paleteria is the first retail shop for a small local company run by Guillermina Soto Barrios that has supplied paleteros — paleta-cart pushers — for the past four years. Dozens of the empty pushcarts, each with its telltale row of jingle bells, sit off to the side. Vendors rent the carts and ply the Hispanic neighborhoods throughout the city, ringing the bells.

A crockpot filled with corn kernels perfumes the air and brings Perez back to her Texas childhood. "Aah, it's elote con crema," she says, ordering a 16-ounce Styrofoam cup of it, frosted with mayonnaise and chile powder.

But we're soon on to the serious business of eating paletas. We discovered on our previous stop that four is the ideal number for a paleta posse, as each frozen treat has four corners to start eating on. So we plow through these with more methodology. The flavors largely seem more artificial, some even downright chemical. But everyone enjoys the chile and mixed fruit pop, and the blue "chicle" pop studded with pieces of gum is a hoot. (I can visualize my kid begging for it.)

A peek back in the factory reveals something of an ice pop morgue, a dim tile floor holding several steel paleta vats, each covered with a tight-fitting lid. Bottles of flavorings and essences fill a shelf.

Fun on the farm

Our next stop brings us to an industrial park in Doraville, where the La Granja paleta factory supplies 19 flavors of paleta to retail outlets and paleteros throughout Georgia, the Carolinas and Alabama. As with Bambi Paleteria, vendors rent the carts and spread good humor with the sound of their bells.

(Speaking of Good Humor, that company owns the trademark to the word Popsicle, which is why you won't see it used elsewhere in this article.)

At La Granja, owner Ljubica Wellman invites us into her office and explains how she, her mother and her brother got into the pop business five years ago. As Chilean immigrants to Atlanta, they saw a need for ice cream flavors that would appeal to Latin American immigrants. They also saw that the vast majority of these people were Mexican, and they wanted paletas, not cones. So they went to Mexico to research flavors.

"Come on," Wellman offers, "I'll show you where we make them." Inside a tidy industrial kitchen, workers huddle around a case of fresh tamarind pods, shucking the skins and peeling the sticky fruit free of its seeds.

"Tamarind has to be fresh," Wellman says. "If you use flavoring, it's no good."

In addition to the 19 standing flavors of cream-based and water-based pop, La Granja offers seasonal options, like peach. it makes 4,000-6,000 paletas a day.

Elsewhere in the kitchen, dozens of paletas chill in their ethylene glycol baths, while workers blend fresh melon. A new wrapping machine stands by. Wellman says it has saved her family marathon nights of hand wrapping.

We head over to the loading dock lined with 19 ice chests — one for each flavor — and Wellman prepares a sampler pack. A little giddy from the serious sugar intake, a couple of us begin steering about some of the pushcarts, which are decorated with cartoon farm animals. ("Granja" means farm.) Where did the name come from?

Wellman laughs. "That's my family. My brother is the cat and that's me, the pig."

A sampling orgy

We take our booty over to Perez's shop, LottaFrutta, to try it. By this point, it is early evening and the store is closed for the day. We spread out the paletas on a table and begin to sample.

The flavors all seem to true to an ideal — sometimes natural, sometimes a guilty pleasure. The tamarind is brilliant, clean and tart and awash in the unique tang of that fruit. The orange tastes like orange soda pop.

The coconut is like cake on a stick. The black walnut distinctive, the mango too smooth and sweet, the dulce de leche an amazing concoction ribboned with caramel strands.

And then we try the chile and swoon. "It's so round," Zyman says, sounding like a wine geek. "The flavor comes full circle on your tongue."

This reddish blend of melon, cucumber and hot pepper may be the top pop of the day.

Then Perez breaks out a couple of her paletas, which she molds in a plastic drink cup and hard-freezes with a stick coming out the lid.

The passion fruit is bracingly sour and refreshing. The coconut tastes like fruit, not cake.

"Wow. Will you teach me how to make these?" I blurt out, suddenly renewed after 50 ice pops.

Perez agrees to share her recipes, learned from her grandmother. And she does. But that's another story.