Lunch in the Old City

I caught my breath on the bus long enough to notice as it stuck again in my throat in a jarring, bumping, no-margins what-so-ever glide into older, grander, dingier parts of Lima. The five or so rough lanes of traffic on the wide boulevard were swimming with the old metal busses, starting, stopping, lurching and careening so close to one another that it seemed there must be some kind of mad magic guiding the hands of the drivers and cushioning the hulking rigid bubbles that seemed destined to crumple one another without warning. I had a nervous grin plastered on my face, and my hands polished well-worn holds as I craned my neck to watch close call after close call whoosh by. The boulevard, for all its grandiose scale, was inconsistently covered, with large sections dropping several inches at a time and jostling over archaeological bricks and pavers. Our course led through a landscape which changed from big box retailers and KFC's (both literal, and some other chicken joints which included casinos), to huge parks full of public works and fantastic old buildings, to a dense crumbly center of shored-up, throbbing, antique city.

We stepped out of the bus onto the hot street and were met with a face-full of smells that were initially hard to place. As we walked, it became apparent that the odor was the product of an entire district of printing businesses, all churning out brightly colored posters and pirate media covers. Beyond this area we found the district that we'd been looking for, blocks full of rooms open to the street each with a placard announcing its menu. After this much time spent in transit, we were at a loss to choose a place and we picked our restaurant slowly and poorly.

From the outside most of the places looked the same, and the difference in price was something that only people truly out of whack in terms of budget and exchange rate delirium would have quibbled over, and so, as I recall, we made the unfortunate decision to low-ball it. We ended up with a truly scary spread: glistening lettuce, a goblet of clearish liqud that appeared to have something grainy like the end of a glass of juice, strange fish, sinister-looking seaweed, gristle, bone, repeated helpings of rice-bean slurry and an off-yellow jello.

Our discomfort was further complicated by a conversation with a man who was trying to hard-sell us a lunchtime serenade via the improbable technique of telling us that we lacked the capacity for the true, deep musical expression like that of indigenous people like himself. The man was unpleasant, the food more-so, and yet things were so busy in the hot dark room that we remained at the mercy of this musical extortionist and his pitch, unable to pay our bill. We left abruptly, feeling bad about wasting awful food and worse about being picked on while doing so.

The vibe was not so good, and the crowds in the streets that day were packed-in tightly and eager for sols. We walked in circles briefly before finding the first hostel (closed) and then the second hostel we hoped to investigate. We were ushered into a very old waiting room full of deteriorating antiques and a pleasant funk, then through a pair of locked doors into what all senses was unmistakably a hospital. At three beds to a room, a rate hike, and the promise of a horrible schlep to get our stuff there, we were not impressed and waited to be let out again.

We needed to redeem the old city, at least for the purposes of this first visit, so we kept walking. The square was beautiful, sunny, filled with weird stuff to look at, Saints' identities to debate and little old ladies to talk to.







The buildings in this part of Lima, as should now be apparent, are extremely ornate and colorful, and on the other side of the square we turned right and came to a pink building with a glass ceiling full of women trading in collectible objects: coins, bills, photos, all kinds of bits and pieces wrapped in cellophane. I went in to be cool.



After this, we almost turned back, but half a block further we ran into a whole lot of stalls out in the sun. Posters, books, prints, textiles, toy guns, guns on the backs of soldiers strolling pairs of soldiers. Dear reader, if you'll recall them from our video shot in Parque Central, we were once more surrounded by familiar geometric solids protruding from the paved thoroughfare. Off toward what I think was the North, a hillside peppered with colorful boxes was set behind a frothy brown river under a suspension bridge.









A man with a microphone strung from a small amplifier preached an uncomfortably earnest gospel to no one in particular, and we started to head for shade and cold drinks, when we spotted the food. There, piled in the sun, were heaps of wonderful everything, ceviche, cuy, choclo, a perverse Peruvian smorgasbord! I was still not hungry, in fact still quite unappetized by our unfortunate lunch, Miriam is blessed with the powers of temporary amnesia and instantaneous hunger in situations of obvious deliciousness, and was quickly served up a heaping plate of exquisite.



To complement this munching, we were offered the stylings of the saddest mime ever, a young man who's boxed entrapment and briefcase pantomime drew yawns and muffled golf claps from even those in the crowd who seemed to be obvious stooges (relatives). Poof! the ceviche vanished into the mid-afternoon heat, and we resumed our wandering. We adopted a brisk pace back in the general direction of the street that we had come by, stopping to look at gnarled church carvings and full-service dentist/doctor/surgeon/obgyn boutiques for the do-it-yourself type. We were slowed only briefly by a strange, mustachioed fellow wearing a Hawaiian shirt who took up about two minutes chit chatting and only pulled out the ol' "Taxi?" "Weed?" bit after I'd summoned all of my linguistic powers to tell him that we were late and needed to get a move on.

The afternoon was nearly played-out by this point, and we had to make the hostel in time to ask politely if we could re-check-in and avoid having to move in the dark. We caught the bus back and hopped out at the corner of Parque Central...

Lima - Not Like the Beans

Piura, as I believe I mentioned before, was somewhere around the temperature of melting flesh. The bus station was being vaguely fanned by an air conditioner that was exhausted into the very room that it sought to cool. For some diversion from the wait, we took turns watching the bags while one of us went to the bathroom and tried to cool off by bathing in the sink. To keep the level of stress in the waiting room high, the space was equipped with a television playing a strange talk show, a la the Today show but hosted in part by an Elvis impersonator and a few mischievous muppets, and in the corner several coolers full of refreshing foods and beverages with no one to sell them to the sweating masses.

When the time finally came to board our bus, the procedure was somewhat different from what had been the norm on our previous rides on the continent. After checking our larger bags we were asked to line up and proceed through a vaguely airport-like security line that involved having our bags and ourselves metal-detected and our identification checked against our tickets. Following this, we got settled on the top floor, and were treated to an airline-style video explication of the safety and convenience features to be found on bus. Most of this, as in the case of airline announcements, was really blase. The exception to this boring list of amenities and rules, was the repeated statement that the toilets onboard were for urine only. URINE ONLY. Just urine! Anyone in need of a more realistic bathroom experience was instructed to knock on the door to the drivers' cabin and request a stop, an action which seemed to me to be a clear violation of the "Don't talk to the driver!" policy which was both announced and also posted in a number of places around the bus.

The bus ride was a funny combination of the intense professionalism and robotic ineffectuality of plane flights everywhere and the down-home, personalized style of service that had come to characterize most of our bus trips up to that point. We played a goofy version of bingo that was, apparent to everyone else in the bus (I couldn't resist calling bingo upon actually getting five in a row), blackout only. We were fed a meal of chicken, yellow rice and a lot of other odd crap that was somewhere roughly on par with airline food. We watched a promotional film that contained a ringing bimbo endorsement of the Nazca area of Peru, and was accompanied by a portion of a catholic sermon taken from 60's era Spanish cinema. After this, we watched an overdubbed version of a moody Jonathan Demme film. Hearing the bellowingly overdubbed Spanish words attempt to carry this film with its subtle themes of familial angst, drug abuse, race relations in the United States and the institution of marriage was fascinatingly confusing, and the only time during the trip that a bus line would elect to pit its passengers against such weighty material :-P.

Outside the bus, was an ongoing parade of landscapes reaching from the arid to the verdant and domiciles made of concrete and rebar, ambiguous in their positions on the continuum of new construction to disrepair.

Before the sun went down, Miriam and I spent a good long time poring over our guides and trying to figure out what to do in Peru in the four or five days that we'd be spending there. Because of the state of the sacred valley, and the apparent lack of things curious, ancient and/or beautiful in the Lima area, we decided on a mosey down toward Nazca in hopes of seeing some lines and perhaps some other coastal archaeological sites as well.

As usual, we arrived very early in the morning, overdressed and partially mummified in cool dry bus air. We had found out from one of our maps that our first task of finding the Grupo Ormeno bus terminal and getting tickets back to Quito ought to be an easy one, due to its location of less than one centimeter away from our present location on the map. We got our bags, adjusted ourselves to the heat and weight, and pushed through a throng of taxi drivers to walk along a major highway. After a couple of circles, we got headed in the right direction and arrived at another bus terminal. We bought the tickets and felt a slight monetary sting, and also much relief. As it turned out, we would still have to change our plane flight from Santiago to Lima to make the schedule fit properly.

Miriam went to the bathroom and I sat in the terminal, feeling as tired and dirty as I had up to that point in the trip. My gaze bounced around the room, out of the windows and into the bustle of the roadways surrounding the terminal, and finally up to the large flat television above the counter. We were watching news and, as I looked, the story took on a more urgent tone, a redder color, and more of the screen. A series of images flashed: small planes, desert shots, ambulances, stretchers and finally petroglyphs. The news from Nazca, our latest destination of choice, was "Plane Crash". Our Peru plans had hit another snag, and we were in need of a fresh Lima alternative.

Miriam returned, and I pointed to the screen and let her watch our plans unravel for herself. We got briefly mad, but we were still just way too filthy to be overly caught up in our misfortune. For now, we needed lodging and hot, running water.

Back outside, on the edge of the great thoroughfare of eighteen or twenty lanes, we started the process of taxi haggling, aided by the price quote we'd received from the woman selling bus tickets. The first driver we asked looked back at us, puzzling over this question himself for a good long time. After a few seconds, he agreed and we tossed our stuff into the back of his taxi station wagon, house-painted yellow with boom box speakers wired up in the back. As we entered the cab, I looked around the vehicle to compare it to those we'd seen before and those we were likely to see in the coming weeks. This was the cab in which it dawned on me that none of the cars we'd ridden in were ever holding even a full half-tank of gas. Also, after we re-entered the cab, our driver asked again what our destination was, and then, seeing that we had a map, asked to borrow our map. This man, with his car full of everyday stuff, was playing cabbie for a day. After watching him drive past our street, in what should have been a well-known tourist district, twice, we finally had him pull over to the corner, and walked the final block.

We'd pre-chosen our hostel, on the corner of Berlin & Bellavista,

From 2010-02-26

using the quadruple vector of cheapness, proximity to the bus station at which we'd arrived, its presence in our guidebook and the advertised opportunity to pay with plastic. Aside from those critical features, the Stop and Drop didn't sound like too bad a place. There was, as the ad in our Footprints guide specified, network access, free breakfast, and hot water. We buzzed their door at around 7:30 AM and received a mumble in return as the door opened. The bleary but friendly staff guys, dressed perpetually in pirate, engrish, surfwear, mumbled us through the check-in procedures and we had time to shower before breakfast service began.

From 2010-02-26

After furiously consuming two white rolls, butter, jam and two cups of tea, and making polite conversation with the extremely skinny, middle-aged lady who seemed to be in charge of breakfast every day, sweeping and feeding the roof cat, we left the hostel and, with what must have been by official count our twentieth "second wind" of the bus travel period, went to survey the town, to reschedule our plane tickets, to come up with an alternative to our Nazca outing, to eat food, to check our respective emails and to enjoy life outside a bus.

COMING UP on TrotamundosSA:
1. Video from Lima
2. Our Heroes Match Wits with the Powerful Ladies of LAN
3. God Thwarts More Spectacles
4. Lima is Squeezed for All its Delicious Entertainment Value
5. Miriam and Peter Realize that Since Creating Blog in Cuenca, They Have Neglected to Feed or Clothe it Properly, and Thus They Must Begin to Write In Earnest
6. Indigestion
7. Fuentes Like You Wouldn't Believe!
8. A Blue, Blue Market

Real-time Homecoming and A Hot Day in Piura

Jiggity Jig - April 25, 2010

I'm back in Iowa (likewise, Miriam is back in Pennsylvania). This actually happened about four days ago, but I still haven't quite gotten used to the feeling. The adventure is still warm in my senses and on my limbs. The way to describe this place and its familiar features seems to take the form of only one word, thus far: opulence.
My stomach too seems to be experiencing difficulty understanding what has happened in the last few days. Suddenly the milk is fresh again, not that stuff that will stand forever at room temperature in a box. The cupboards are brimming full with a well-stocked collection of the rare elements that drive tastebuds mad the world over. My guts aren't prepared for this access, and they're letting me know that I must take things slowly.
Anyway, among the opulent features of the life I find myself rejoining is a constant access to the internet, which should be a real boon insofar as the updating of this blog is concerned. So, without dwelling any longer on understanding and telling the concluding portions of this tale, let me continue with our trudge into the depths of Peru.

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We sat, sweating and thumbing through our respective guidebooks (Peru was the only country for which we had afforded this kind of redundancy, hauling both the Footprints 2010 and the Lonely Planet 2008). We had already bought our tickets from Piura to Lima, and were now on an endurance race to kill the many hours that lay between us and our departure time, something like 1800 hrs, in the least unpleasant way. I don't remember exactly what we were looking for in our books, and in fact the search was probably more of a general survey of Peru-bound possibilities, but I do remember at least one thing that we found.

Somewhere in Lonely Planet 2008, I think near the front of the book and perhaps in a section giving some cultural overview of the country to be toured, I ran across a passage warning travelers about a known hazardous time of year for the South America sojourner: Semana Santa. Holy week, the book informed, was a time when all forms of transportation and lodging clogged with use, and also a time when fares were jacked up from sixty to one hundred percent. Unfortunately, for erstwhile Lutherans like myself, holy week is not something that falls on a hard and fast date year after year. Rather, one can find it lurking vaguely in the range of March-April. This, as many of you know, was nearly the entire range of our trip, and a very scary unknown indeed.

We left the bus terminal, each of us carrying all of our possessions once again, and hobbled off through the streets of Piura. We had goals now, and because the sun had not yet reached its zenith we were still confident in our ability to enjoy accomplishing them.

The first problem to be addressed was a lack of food. Our maps of Piura were terrible, and we ended up at a bank first, so Miriam withdrew some Nuevo Soles. As we once again entered the flow of Piura foot traffic, we began to notice that we were still too early in the morning to hope to find food on the street that was not sold in a package. We sat down on some benches in front of a huge church and waited in the shade for half an hour. Now things were beginning to wake up, this must have been around 1000hrs. We located a little place that appeared to do some food and while I ate a jamon y queso, Miriam tried out the first ceviche of Peru, one so memorable for its quality that she would reference it throughout the remainder of our trip. It was a refreshing, albeit not (relatively) cheap desayuno: the ceviche probably cost between three and four dollars.

From 2010-02-25

From there we walked back out to the main plaza and had a look around. Miriam had noticed a tourist information office that had been closed before, adjacent the bank. That office was now open, air conditioned, and likely to know all about Peru's potential diversions and probably the precise dates of Semana Santa this year. We went in and were given what I found to be a completely hypnotic and exhaustive explication of every archaeological site in Peru by a pleasant young woman with a very methodical, rhythmic and soft tone. At one point, during something like the fifth of seven or so maps of different regions of Peru, my head slipped off of my left hand and lurched quite close to the table. After learning about more than a lifetime's worth of Peruvian attractions, we finally had the good sense to ask about the dates of holy week. Which, as it turned out, was scheduled for precisely the time when we would hurriedly revisit this expansive, international road trip on the way to a date with the Galapagos. We left, freaked out about our newfound scheduling debacle, though now equipped with an extensive collection of maps and pamphlets and two fine complimentary ballpoints.

Our next stop: LAN. We crossed the plaza again to investigate the true malleability of the terms and conditions of our South America Airpass. As I recall, we entertained a few ideas about how best to overcome the problems then coming to light in our itinerary. If we were lucky we could just rearrange things to suit this obstacle: shift each flight outright, cut out one leg, add another. If we were less lucky, we supposed, we might have to do something more drastic altogether, such as lose our second stint in Peru altogether and fly directly from Santiago back to Quito. As it turned out, neither of these options was within the range luck afforded. The details of our itinerary had become final once we made our initial flight, and any additions to the trip would fall under the insane pricing schedule that usually applies to foreigners flying under LAN. The best we could hope for was to shift the dates of one flight for a less insane fee, and hope for available buses when the time came.

As we left LAN, worried and somewhat underwhelmed by the apparent inflexibility of our trip, we soon forgot thoughts of our grandiose logistical problems in favor of thoughts such as "Why are we carrying all of our stuff right now?" or "Are we on the surface of the sun?" and, of course, "I know I'll regret saying this but, I wish we were on the damn bus already!" We dragged our under-rested bodies through the streets, almost as though we were pulling dying pack animals (ourselves) through some hellish desert, while onlookers smiled and chuckled, and made me wonder about just how stupid we looked and whether we weren't really that stupid. At that moment, we seemed to me extremely stupid, though a very nice person could probably get away with simply describing us as ridiculously unfortunate or perhaps retarded.

Not wanting to melt, and seeing few options aside from pushing on, we bought water, checked our email, and then headed for an ice cream shop. One great thing about traveling with Miriam is that ice cream has an almost cinematic ability to save the day.

From 2010-02-25

This ice cream experience was, thankfully, no exception to the physics of Miriam, and the good vibe carried us back to the stifling bus station, and all through the end of the wait and the process of boarding. And that's where the next chapter begins: on the road to Lima.

Food, Food, Food

So, I really like eating. And I spend much of each day dreaming about the food I might presently, or some time in the distant future, be eating. It therefore seems only fair that I attempt to channel some of this enthusiasm into explaining some of the exciting delicious items we get to consume down here.

Obviously, out of all the cuisines floating around South America, I am most familiar with Ecuadorian/Northern Andean. So in Quito, I had some very specific cravings that needed to be fulfilled, and some old haunts to visit to do it.

One of my favorite places to eat in the Mariscal is Kallari, especially for breakfast. It's run by a sustainable indigenous cooperative based in the Ecuadorian Amazon. They make delicious delicious dark chocolate, which is awesome 1) because it can be really hard to find decent chocolate around here sometimes, and 2) because although Ecuador is home to some of the best cacao in the world, most large-scale chocolate production isn't controlled by Ecuadorians. The Ecuadorian beans get sent elsewhere to be processed, packaged, etc., and then the chocolate has to be imported back into Ecuador, and they don't really get much out of the profits. Kallari is really exciting because they grow, harvest, produce, and sell their own stuff. And it's really good.

Anyway, their little cafe in Quito has these great breakfast deals, which always create this horrible dilemma: you can get hot chocolate made with their homegrown stuff kind of melted into hot milk, or you can get juice. And you have to pick.

Juice is maybe the very best part of Ecuadorian food. They have about a zillion fruits to choose from, and all the juice is fresh-squeezed, and it's just amazingly good. And you can get juice made out of strawberries,

which Peter did, and it's in that gigantic glass. Just think about how many strawberries got mushed to make that. Yum. Also we got some standard USA breakfasty items, which is somewhat of a rare thing. Most South Americans eat breakfast of rolls and jam, or sometimes cheese, and instant coffee or tea.

Besides empanadas, which I insisted on eating for pretty much every other meal, what I really couldn't leave Quito without was locro de queso. Soups are another of my favoritist aspects of Ecuadorian cuisine, and locro is my favorite of all the soups. It's kind of a creamy potato soup with chunks of queso fresco (cheese) and potato, and with big ol' slices of avocado on top. I made Peter and Dan go on a locro hunt with me, with excellent results:

Seriously, so good. It's over there on the right. You can also see some empanadas, fried pockets with pretty much whatever you want stuffed inside. The one in front of Dan is an empanada de morocho, which means that the outside is made with morocho, a kind of maize. The red stuff in that little bowl in the center of the table is ají, spicy sauce that's often homemade, and unique to each eatery. Way better than ketchup.

Lameness, then Redemption!

I. Lameness

Okay, so we already have a little preliminary, excuse-making, caveat section here at the very top of the blog, but by my watch (an artifact that I do not own) it has been a ridiculous amount of time since we posted anything here, and it's beginning to look as if we've faked the whole thing and are still somewhere between the hotel and JFK painstakingly photoshopping ourselves into other people's vacation pictures scavenged from google images. Thus, here I am, dear reader, to assure one and all that this is not the case, and to stir things up with a shiny new post.

The problem with posting is not currently a lack of material, as we have been scribbling things more or less ferociously at quite respectable intervals into our respective notebooks. The problem is even conceptualizing the difference between where we are now and where we were when last something was posted, not that that date has any particular correspondence to the space-time coordinates of what was actually posted about.

Also, something must be said regarding our current proximity to the singularity. Remember how in 2007 TIME magazine made "You" the person of the year thanks to the rise of a fancy little service allowing every bit of video anyone ever shot to be uploaded, indexed and compared by everyone? We are dreadfully far away from anything like this video+internet phenomenon, we are practically dialing up, we are tantamount to climbing the highest hill available in our given location (in Buenos Aires this would mean taking an elevator to the top of a large building) and morse coding these entries home via laser pointer. Therefore, much of the really tasty meat of the vacation (forgive me, I've been eating way too much grassfed beef), the video archive, will remain unseen perhaps until we return. Something to look forward to.

I believe when last you were spoken to, our story took place somewhere in Ecuador, and our physical presence was already two countries past that in Argentina. We are still in Argentina, and have a couple more days before we head off toward what I can only think to describe as an uncomfortable disaster tour of Chile, providing it does not simply slough off into the Pacific in the next few hours. I'm sure we'll have a good six days.

II. Redemption

Directly following the events described in previous installations of TrotamundosSA.blogspot.com, we spent another day in Quito. Miriam and I rose, somewhat groggy from a late-in-the-evening conversation fueled by not small amounts of cheap beer, packed and waited for friendly co-traveler Dan to return from some mildly dehumanizing bit of national, paper-gathering, bureaucratic nonsense. Apparently the Ecuador model for these sorts of goings-on is designed to function something like a scavenger-hunt with extremely vague goals and extremely rigid and unpredictable windows of opportunity, and after something like four hours, we paid Dan's share and checked out, hoping that he would eventually make it back to the neighborhood. Which he did, having completely failed to obtain the particular bits of paper necessary to appease the great mechanistic god of international relations.

To compensate for this upset, we got some delicious foods

From 2010-02-23

including the first corn that I have really enjoyed in years (choclo), the weirdest and most erratically filled tamale I've ever tasted, and some downright panaceic mate de coca. Bolstered by our meal, we shared a little internet time and then parted ways. Dan headed out to try to find a peanut butter sandwich or something and Miriam and I began our quest to find buses to Peru.

And that's pretty much how the day went, looking for tickets, deciding that said tickets were far too expensive, searching for different tickets, more direct routes, better border crossings, etc. Eventually, roughly two things happened. We discovered that all the buses were pretty much the same, all the routes were pretty much comparable and all the prices were pretty much what we were going to have to pay, so we opted for a bus that would get us out of town at 10 PM and take us as far as Cuenca.

We still had one social activity left in fair Quito, and that was a late lunchish gathering involving the SIT professors from Miriam and Dan's program: Fabian and Siena. This was held at a little middle-eastern joint near the Mariscal, and was thoroughly pleasant, though not as tasty as our brunch.

After this late almuerzo we headed to the bus station to wait, people watch, and catch snippets of overdubbed Big Daddy. Adam Sandler's overdubbed voice is a goofy thing to behold, and they really can't manage to adequately translate his nasaly humor into the big booming voice of the Spanish-speaking, leading actor. Here's a picture of a lady wearing some really creepy jeans in the bus terminal:

From 2010-02-23

After strolling out to eat a most anemic hotdog, largely a pretext for using a bathroom for free, we sat some more, and then tried with increasing exasperation to figure out which bus we were supposed to board for Cuenca. Somehow, magic, luck, and determination swirled together, and poof we were aboard. Miriam snored gently by my side as I watched dubbed Anaconda (a film which is really better this way), contemplated just how low I'd have to amputate my legs in order to continue to travel by bus for the rest of the trip, and read the guidebook entry on deep vein thrombosis....

More to follow!

And for those of you interested in reading a blog that is updated regularly and with nauseating enthusiasm and hilarity, check out: potpied.blogspot.com