sybarites

I was just bitten by the biggest insect I have ever seen. I took off my jacket and started walking around when I felt a pinch on my finger. When I looked under my coat I saw a long brown something and dropped the coat. Out crawled a four or five inch long brown insect, which looked up at us gnashing it’s half-inch mandibles and waving it’s antennae for a few seconds. Then it spread its wings and flew towards us before veering off to land in a tree. I haven’t been able to find out what it was.

This was just after we saw our first Peruvian Hairless Dog.

Update: My aunt Carol discovered the identity of the insect. It’s a female dobsonfly. Since they spend most of their life as larvae in water, most people don’t know they exist from the United States to Northern Argentina. The ones in Peru are BIG.

I can´t remember the last time I drank red wine that came out of a box. I´m certain that when and/or if this has ever occurred, it has been an act of desperation and a genuine result of zero options. However, I am now forced to revise this personal statistic as I have willingly consumed – relished, even – a glass of boxed vino tinto.

The circumstances involved are exceptional. The evening in question was the third and final night of our 4-day trek along the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, a breathtaking and awe inspiring enigma of history, if I´ve ever seen one. However, the night before we began our pre-dawn hike up to the Sun Gate, our group of 11 hikers were treated to an exceptional campsite meal. The chef of our trek (we had a real chef!), Roberto, produced an astonishing meal from the cook tent perched at 2800m. in the Peruvian jungle. In the mess tent, with real tables and chairs, we were presented with a first course of delicious chili-vegetable soup followed by a main course of stuffed chicken in cream sauce, tender beef in gravy, fresh beet and apple salad, garlic bread, fluffy rice, and delicate toasts with mandarin-raisin salad. I was agog. How he could´ve conceived such an elaborate meal -nay, feast! – in such an environment is amazing. And to this meal was added the vino. Maybe it was the altitude, or the aching muscles or the good company, but that wine was a lovely slice of luxury next to that dinner.

More to follow on this Wonder of the Modern World as soon as we can upload some pictures. This trek was one of the most incredible things we have done this past year.

If I were forced to describe Cusco in terms of what other city in the world it most closely resembles, I think I would say “Florence, Italy.”  This picture especially illustrates my point with its red-tile roofs and late 16th century architecture.  Plus, with all the plazas and an abundance of churches, it really does seem to have a lot in common with it’s Italian cousin.  Of course, having never been to Spain myself, it may be that Cusco closely resembles a city or two there, given that it was conquered by the Spanish…

If you look closely, you can see the title of this post shaved into the distant hillside.

We must’ve walked past this ancient Inca wall in Cusco about 4 times before we realized what we were passing. Not four blocks from our hostel is this remarkable example of Pre-Colombian architecture.
I read that they used several techniques to made some exceptionally solid walls: they placed larger, convex stones at the bottom and smaller ones at the top, all doors and windows are trapedoizal in shape and the stones are carved to roughly the same trapedoiz-ish shapes.

In this pic, Marc is posing beside the famous “Stone of 12 Angles”, which was not only in the wall past which we walked several times, it was nearly constantly the focus of a tour group. Sometimes we can be so unobservant.

Indeed, they are so well made that they have withstood two major earthquakes 300 years apart and are still so solid that colonial and modern buildings use their Incan foundations. The way the stones fit together so tightly, without the use of mortar, is quite impressive. They say that some are so well fitted that not even a knife’s blade can slide between them. This church and cloistered convent is perched on top of what used to be part of the Sun Temple.

Besides wall watching, we spent some time examining Incan art and pottery.

Yesterday, we made a fortunate and random coffee stop at a place called Cicciolina’s, in Cuzco. They have an exceptional bakery, tapas bar and fine-dining restaurant all in one building. I had to try a flaky croissant with cheese and basil, even though I had already eaten breakfast. Perusing the tapas menu, we decided to return for an early birthday dinner at the restaurant, since we would be hiking toward Machu Picchu on my actual birthday.

Cuy, or roasted guinea pig, is a traditional Peruvian specialty and was actually depicted as the meal into which Jesus and pals were about to dive in the last supper painting in Cuzco’s biggest cathedral. We weren’t going to go out of our way to try it until we saw it on Cicciolina’s starter menu. A fine dining restaurant is usually a safe place to explore the unusual. The guinea pig confit was served in a terrine of sorts with two different mashed starches: one was yucca, the other we were not able to identify. The meat was mild with the texture and color of dark chicken meat or domestic rabbit, rather than the strong flavors of game or wild rabbit. This marks the first time that Janet has eaten meat from an animal which she has also had as a pet. I still can’t make that claim.

Janet followed that up with an alpaca steak, her first camelid meat, in a four pepper cream sauce with crispy yucca souffle and oven roasted tomatoes. The alpaca was much like a beef steak, but a little tougher and stringier, although not unpleasant or strongly flavored. I played it safe with lamb. The surprise turned out to be the mashed starch, which tasted like liver had been added. On it’s own it wasn’t particularly pleasant, but when tasted with the lamb it became a rich earthy flavor that wasn’t overpowering. For dessert we tried the pear poached with lemongrass and coriander.

Everything was so good we stopped in for lunch this afternoon and our sandwiches did not disappointed. I ordered the serrano ham with machengo cheese, roasted red peppers, carmelized onions and organic arugula grown in the nearby Sacred Valley. Mmmm, sacred lettuce. Although none of those ingredients are particularly unusual, they were all very high quality and complimented each other extremely well. It’s hard to go wrong with carmelized onions and arugula. Janet ordered a tasty teriyaki chicken sandwich with avacado, toasted seasame seeds and organic greens. Our drinks were equally special—lemonade with mint and ice tea with mint, cinnamon sticks, and whole cloves.

The experience made me dread going home where we may not find such interesting food or will have to pay four times as much for it.

I only wish we had had the time to be more creative with our amateur videoing and dying battery.

On Tuesday night, we lodged at the driest hotel in the world. It was a building made entirely of salt, perched at 3400m. above sea level on the windy side of a hill facing a salt plain. The clothes that got wet in our backpacks (the water bottles strapped to the roof of our vehicle had leaked) were dry within a couple of hours.
The walls, beds and tables are made of bricks of crystallized salt and the floors are just loose, grainy salt. I had the idea that if I buried Marc’s 3-day-old socks in the sand, they might lose some of their moisture and, therefore, their “aroma”. I think it might’ve worked.
For a novelty thing, it was pretty interesting, and the view of the stars and the milky was exceptional, if freezing cold.

On a different topic, we went for a really enjoyable observatory night excursion while in San Pedro de Atacama. A French-Chilean couple has set up an operation just outside the town where they have several telescopes set up and offer a two-hour tour of the night skies of the south. We saw the true Southern Cross (not the one we thought we had seen in Patagonia), a view of Saturn up close and, most interesting, a couple of Magellan clouds, which are actually other galaxies. They are named after Magellan because he was the first European to sail far enough south to see one. I had never heard of them before. I had also never heard of melting a chocolate bar in hot milk to make hot chocolate, which we got at the end of the tour. I’ll be experiencing one of them again when we get home.

I just like this picture.

Our last day in Chile was our first day in Bolivia, which might as well be known as The Day of Extremes. We booked ourselves on a 3-day trip from San Pedro de Atacama to Uyuni through some of the strangest, and most beautiful landscape in a pretty harsh climate. The first day out, we crossed the border dressed for heat; this was a mistake. The wind whipping across the high altitude desert was icy cold and even the sun didn’t provide much warmth. We quickly dug out our sweaters and jackets and even then, we were chilly with each exit from the truck.
However, with the arid cold came some extraordinary features. We drove past Volcan Licancabur, which I think last erupted in 2006 (?), and this is where we started feeling the altitude. It started with a bit of a headache, sort of like a dehydration headache, which got progressively worse as we climbed to 4800m. after lunch. We spent the night at 4300m. and each time I rolled over in bed, I was short of breath. At least this will be a good warm-up for Cusco (3600m.) and Macchu Picchu (2800m.).
We stopped at several lakes throughout the journey, but some of the nicest pictures we got were of Laguna Verde, green from the copper in the lake’s sediment. Amazingly, many of the lakes in the area are home to pink flamingos. I somehow thought they only liked hot climate but they were feeding in abundance at several stops. Apparently, it’s the red colour of the tiny shrimps that they eat that pinks them up.
At lunch on the first day, we stopped at a thermal pool which looked out into the scrubby desert. This was our first bath in a year and felt brilliant- especially because we knew there would be no hot shower for a couple of days.
Not so far from the thermal pool was a field of geysers and steam vents. Unlike other geysers I’ve visited, this one had no warning signs or barriers and we could, if we had wanted to, get quite close to the pits of boiling mud. We heard from another guy on our tour that a tourist fell into one of the 85C pits last year and, though they pulled him out alive, he only lasted another four hours. Our visit was highly uneventful.
One of the last stops before the piece de resistance of the trip – the Salar de Uyuni – was a field of marvelously eroded Dali-esque rocks. The result of centuries of wind erosion, these rocks became sculptures against a backdrop of brilliantly blue sky and red-coloured mountains. The area had a strangely Mars-ish feeling about it with wide rocky plains and distant, sometimes shimmering mountains. Incredible, really.
However, even these most amazing of extreme landscapes paled in comparison to the largest salt lake in the world…

After waiting for three hours for our Landcruiser to be repaired, we finally headed into the white plain that extended from our salt hotel to well beyond the horizon. The Salar de Uyuni is highest and largest salt lake in the world with an area of 12,000 sq km at an altitude of 3650 meters. It´s more than double the size of the salt lake in Utah. The smooth plain was a relief from the gravel ruts that passed for roads during the previous two days. Trucks race across the salt at highway speeds without rattling our teeth or knocking our heads against the ceiling. To protect from snowblindness, sunglasses are a necessity for all except the drivers who seem immune or possibly half blind already.

The blinding white landscape spawned creativity for many of the tourists who jumped, danced, walked on water and distorted perspective in hundreds of photographs and we were no exception. During the wet season the dry plain is covered with several inches of water that creates a perfect reflection of the sky, but we only saw a small pond.

Standing in the plain, islands of rock appear to float above the horizon because of the heat rising off the plain. We stopped at a relatively small island called Incahuasi (Inca’s Hope) to play in the salt and climb the rocks. The island is covered in large cacti and all the tourist necessities, such as a restaurant and gift shop.

I would never have imagined that such a simple landscape could be so beautiful and captivating.