Gastronomical Update

I haven’t posted in a while, and will probably won’t have time tonight to update regarding what I’ve been doing, but I would like to do a quick culinary review of my trip to Peru:


Name: Pisco Sour

Type: Alcoholic beverage

Short description: Peru’s National cocktail (or Chile’s if you ask a Chilean). made of Pisco (Peruvian grape brandy), lime juice, some egg white and crushed ice. In short, a chick drink.

Visual impression: Like lemonade with a big head of white foam.

Taste (and smell, if relevant): Lemon juice with a bit (just a bit) of alcohol.

Grade out of 10: 5


Name: Cuy

Type: Meat dish

Short description: Roasted guinea pig. Served on festive occasions and every Peruvian’s favorite.

Sample pic (for illustration purposes alone):



Guinea Pig





Cuy




Visual impression: Like a chicken with a rat’s head.

Taste (and smell, if relevant): The skin is crispy and very good. There isn’t much meat, but whatever I managed to find was kind of like quail (meaning like chicken but more tender and more greasy).

Grade out of 10: 8.5


Name: Ceviche

Type: Sea food dish.

Short description: Raw fish and/or shellfish marinated (and thus "cooked") in some lemon juice. It is possible, and not very hard, to find this dish in Israel, but it is considered something of a national dish in Peru.

Visual impression: As expected.

Taste (and smell, if relevant): Hey, It’s lightly cooked seafood - how can you go wrong (well except from adding loads of coriander)?

Grade out of 10: 9 (would have been a 10 if it wasn’t for the Peruvian affection for coriander).


Name: Chicha (aka "Pure Evil")

Type: Alcoholic beverage.

Short description: A Peruvian beer (home brew) made from corn fermented in human spit. In all fairness, it should be noted that the locals claim that in nowadays Chicha goes under a more standard fermentation process. It should also be noted that after trying it, I don´t believe them.

Visual impression: murky rust water, with a big head of foam.

Taste (and smell, if relevant): Before taking a sip I took a whiff. Bad idea. It smells like stomach acid. The taste is like expired beer, or maybe an extremely sour alcoholic apple cider.

Grade out of 10: -1576


Name: Chicha Morada

Type: Sometimes beverage, sometimes dessert jello.

Short description: Strong purple colored drink or jello. Served at room temperature.

Visual impression: See "short description".

Taste (and smell, if relevant): Sweet and fruity. Reminiscent of quince marmalade.

Grade out of 10: 7


Name: Alpaca Steak

Type: Meat dish.

Short description: Well, it’s alpaca meat.

Visual impression: Looks just like any other beef steak.

Taste (and smell, if relevant): Tastes just like any other beef steak.

Grade out of 10: 10 (Like any beef steak)


Next time (in about 5 days) I`ll finally have time to tell about Cuzco (my current whereabouts).

The Way Inn Lodge, and the Way Out of Huaraz (Sniff, Sniff)

Upon finishing the trek, I went for a day of rock climbing at Chancos, a short drive from Huaraz, and even did a bit of outdoor lead climbing for the first time. It was fun.

The next day, Ashley (the welsh from the Santa Cruz trek) and I moved to a new hostel, about 13 km out of Huaraz, in the mountains, called "The Way Inn Lodge".


The place was great, just great vistas and outdoor activity out of the city. I found some partners for some outdoor bouldering (lots of fun, accompanied by bleeding toes and fingers):

((Is that an extremely cool chalk bag or what?))

And did some great day walks:

I spent about 5 days there, hiking, climbing, getting bitten by sandflies and sunburning my upper lip (I have a bit of a Baron Harkonnen look going now), but the time has come to (very sadly) move on. I´m taking the night bus to Lima tonight, and from there a 5 hour bus to Ica, the best place in Peru for sandboarding and earthquakes.

BTW no. 1:
A file containing all the pics (both for this post and the Santa Cruz one) can be downloaded here.

BTW no. 2:
I fixed the poll and you´re all invited to get me to drink peruvian spit beer.

Laid Back Trekking

With Steve on his way, I wasted no time getting back to the great outdoors, and headed off to do the 4 day Santa Cruz trek.

Again, I did the trek through an agency. Since this trek is much more popular than the Huayhuash, our group consisted of 8(!) people. The large number f people on the group made me a bit worried, but in hindsight these people where the main reason I enjoyed the trek so much, even though we suffered bad visibililty for some of the highlights. The group was made up of a German couple, a Dutch couple, a French guy and a Taiwnanese girl (also a couple), a Welsh guy, and myself. There were all very nice and funny (especially fabrice, the frenchman, who kept making fun of the brit).

As I said, visibility wasn´t very good, and we didn´t even get to see Alpamayo, a mountain that was declared by UNESCO as "the world´s most beautiful mountain". I did however see a cloud that kind of looked like Givat Hamorè.

Is Someone Trying to Tell Me Something?

After Steve had his fit, which was very scary, I managed to get him to our hostel, with the help of our guide, Heimer. Once there, I explained to Steve again what happened, for the tenth time, as he was extremely confused. I had encountered in the past a person suffering from exhaustion and dehydration getting a seizure, so i figured Steve just had to try and take it easy. We took long long showers, relaxed a bit and decided to try and find something to eat (about 7 hours had passed since we had lunch, which consisted mainly of crackers).

I chose a chinese place (lots of them in Peru), and had an Okay meal. Steve managed to eat some soup, and was working on finishing his glass of water, when it happened again. Steve went into a fit of convulsions, and I had to hold him down, while trying to control the situation (a type of control which was comprised of an assortment of curse words, mostly in arabic, and a lot of shouting at the few people who happened to be there to get someone who can help).

Before long, the locals stopped a taxi for us, and Steve regained enough composure to be taken to the hospital. The hospital staff spoke almost no English, so I utilized the many hours I spent as a child watching Panto on TV. Finally an English speaking doctor came, and Steve and I managed to explain what happened.

Steve Stayed at the hospital for 2 days, while I made some errands, and mostly visited with him. After 2 days, Steve was discharged, and traveled to Lima for further testing (more details are on his blog, see the link in the second post).

This would be a good time to mention that so far, every major travelling experience for has involved a travelling companion being admitted to a hospital. Is this supposed to be some kind of message for me? If so, it´s probably in Spanish, and that`s why I don`t understand it.

Soroche and Seizures - Welcome to Huaraz!

What I didn`t mention on my previous post was that before I slept like a baby, I had a short chat with Steve, an american guy who was planning on doing the famous 10 day Huayhuash trek.

We ended up going to the same hostel in Huaraz (the hostel I had planned on was closed when we arrived), and spent a few days of acclimatizing with some day trips:

Laguna Churup (meaning "silence" in Quechua)

Lake Villakocha(?)

The original plan had been to find more people, in order to lower costs, but the city was quite backpacker free at the time, possibly due to the earthquake that may have scared people off (even though it was no where near Huaraz). So, as it turned out, it was just Steve, a guide named Heimer, our donkey driver Eddilberto, and myself. The trek was beautiful - following are some choice pics (if you´re interested, you can find all the pics I took on the trek and day walks on a 40 Mb file downloadable from here. Just choose one of the servers, usually Rapidshare is the easiest, and follow the instructions).

A massive glacier:

Going up to one of the passes:

One of the many alpine lakes in the region:

Can you spot the Viscacha?

Here it is:

Once again, same as in Nepal, I had to deal with AMS, aka altitude sickness, aka Soroche, which
meant frequent headaches. There was a period of 2 days I was a bit overcome with AMS, practically crawling from campsite to campsite, and spending 14 hours a day sleeping. This had my guide a bit worried. He had encouraged us along the trek to drink mate de coca (coca leaf herbal tea), which the Peruvians believe is very good in treating Soroche, and was quite clueless as to what else can be done.

When we met another guide at one of the passes, I overheard the short consultation, and even with my (virtually non existent) Spanish managed to extract the following dialog (roughly translated):

Heimer: "The Israeli has bad Soroche."

Other guide: "Did you give him mate de coca"?

Heimer: "Yes, of course I did!"

Other guide: "Oh. Too bad."

How reassuring.

Anyway, as concerned as he was, Heimer didn´t think that avoiding taking lunch breaks at 5000 meters high mountain passes might help a bit as well. At least I survived.

The really unusual part of this experience, and the main reason I didn´t really have time for updates, came 5 minutes after we got off the bus back in Huaraz. Steve took about 10 steps and suddenly collapsed in a fit of convulsions. Thank god the good people of Peru helped out, and except for a very confused American I didn´t have to handle any other immediate threats. Or so I thought.

Yes, I´m still alive

This is the first real update of what´s been going on with me since I got to Lima, about 2-3 weeks ago. I didn´t like Lima at all, partly because of the ominous descriptions of crime in the big city Lonely Planet is busting with, and partly because it just didn´t seem tht interesting. The few things I managed to accomplish in my the short time I spent there were:

- Eating in a popular ceviche restaurant (the dish was nice, even though they bombarded it with coriander).

- Coming to grips with the fact that everybody in Peru (possibly in all of South America) has better spanish than me, even that dumbass Israeli who took a piss in the river which his guide was using to wash food and dishes (we´ll get to that in a later post). It turns out that: a. "Buenos dias" is not enough. b. Even though spanish and french seem similar to me, nobody understands me when I use a not so eloquent mixture of french babble and english.

- Lonely Planet tells of a place called "Plaza San Martin", which features a statue of Madre Patria, the symbolic mother of Peru. The thing that drew my attention to it, is the story behind the culpture: itturns out that the spanish had given specific orders to give the statue a crown of flames (llama in spanish), so the the local peruvian artist supposedly placed a small figure of a llama on its head. To my giant disappointment the top of the statue´s head isn`t visible from street level. Oh well.

- The hostel I stayed in had a DVD player, and so I finally saw "Pirates of the Caribean 3" (boring), "Borat" (fucking funny as hell) and fragments of "Hostel 2" (don´t even ask).
During those 2 days I also managed the rather simple task of buying an overnight bus ticket to Huaraz, the alleged trekking capital of Peru, which was a bit expensive but well worth it - I slept like a baby.