Paracas National Reserve

The second half of the day, Amy and I were also on a tour...for some reason though, no one else was as interested in this tour, so it was just Amy, Luis, the driver, and me. We went out to the Paracas National Reserve, which is a huge desert...right next to the ocean. It was a little bizarre to see such a barren stretch of land next to something so blue and lively. Luis said that the desert was the dryest desert in the world...it only rains some very small amount of millimeters in a year. This is because the Andes Mountains are nearby and they are so high that the moisture from the ocean can never rise high enough in the atmosphere to condense and become rain...interesting, huh? Keep in mind that this is a super simplified version of what he said...there was also some wind blowing in from the east involved, haha. Anyhoo, we tramped through the desert and saw a ton of fossilized shells...then we walked next to the ocean and found beautiful seashells that had been washed up on shore...they were whole and colorful, the kind that people pay good money for back in the states at craft stores and whatnot. It was very scenic...I will upload pics once I´m on a computer that can perform such a feat, haha. For lunch, Luis took us to a seasfood restaurant where Amy and I tried cerviche, which is kind of like the Peruvian version of sushi...it´s very raw fish marinated in lime juice. And we´re talking all kinds of fish, including mussels and octopi and squid and some kind of conch with a bright pink organ (we think it was the liver) still attached...it was tasty, but my stomach could only handle so much. Afterwards, Luis and I hiked through the desert in search of Chilean flamingos...they hang out on the edges of the reserve but are very shy and very endangered, so they can be kind of hard to see...I got a few blurry pics from a distance. Anyhoo, I need to go now coz Amy needs a salad (she´s such a rabbit, haha) but I´ll finish our adventures later.

written by  kfox on July 18, 2010 from Cusco, Peru
from the travel blog: Peru Adventure!
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Cuy, aka charred guinea pig

Anyway, back to being in Cusco...Amy´s mother Melisa arrived Tuesday morning to accompany us on the remainder of our trip with us, which has been new and fun. We´ve been showing her around Cusco for the last few days...we took her to the Museo Inka, which is a really interesting museum dedicated to Incan as well as pre-Incan cultures. There, we watched a group of women as they made traditional weavings...the process is so intricate and fascinating to me...first they tie two parellel groups of strings (that they have dyed and spun themselves from alpaca and sheep wool) to a large pole. Then they stretch the yarn towards them and weave a third length of yarn in and out of the two parellel lengths of yarn to make the most intricate patterns...I have no idea how they have memorized which strings to go under and which to go on top of, but the weavings come out absolutely beautiful. Occasionally they push all the string together using a sharp piece of bone or readjust the parellel layers of string with the pieces of wood separating them. Each weaving takes about 3 months to complete and the women receive about 50 US dollars for each one. Can you imagine spending 3 months of your life working on this very complex and beautiful weaving and then only receiving 50 dollars for it? I don´t think it´s fair, but these women make a living somehow. Also, one more cool thing about the weavings...the third length of yarn (the one that goes in and out of the two parellel layers) is completely invisible in the final weaving...somehow, the women weave it in and out in such a way that you never see it. Cool, huh?

Okay, so now that I am done babbling about the weavings (I just think they are sooo cool), I am going to talk about another interesting experience Amy, Melisa, and I had on Tuesday. Upon arriving home for lunch, another homestay student (a Belgian named Maxim) told us that he and Manchi were going out for lunch at a cuyeria, a restaurant specializing in cooking the regional Cusquenian dish of guina pig, and would we like to come? None of us had ever tried cuy (aka charred guinea pig, which is quite a luxurious food in Peru) so we decided to accompany them. First, we took a bus waaaaay up into the hills of Cusco...the cuyeria had an amazing view of the city, and for a few minutes, I was fairly relaxed just sitting in the sun and staring out over all the red-tiled roofs. Then the waitress brought our appetizer...a soup full of unknown types of meat. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), I have been to the market enough times to be able to identify odd cuts of meat that we would not eat in the US and recognized them floating about my soup. For example, the spongey, white meat covered in tenticular villi on one side was intestine. The gray, somewhat translucent, fatty meat with little black things poking out of it was pig skin (the black things were HAIR). And so on and so forth. I went into denial mode and ate most of the soup, just so I could add intestine and pig skin onto my list of bizarre meats I have consumed. Most of the meat was far too chewy for my liking, but kudos to Peruvians for not wasting ANYTHING.

Then came the next big challenge...the cuy. Shortly after clearing our soup bowls (all of which were not empty except for Manchi´s, haha), the waitress brought us five plates of what looked like giant barbequed rats stuffed with a large quantity of greenish black herbs. They still had teeth and eyeballs and tiny little paws with tiny little nails, and suddenly all I could think about was my childhood friend Kyle Kavanagh´s guinea pig Henry who used to squeak excitedly at us from his cage. But being me, I ate it anyway. Once I got over the my memories of Henry, the hardest part was penetrating the charred skin and ripping the poor dead thing open with my hands (I had tried to do it with a knife and fork and was promptly corrected by Manchi, who told me I couldn´t rip the bones from the meat without using my hands). The meat had the consistency of chicken, but was more flavorful...don´t ask me how, it was just good. There wasn´t much meat on the poor thing though, so as tasty as it was, I don´t think it was worth killing the poor animal, seeing as I was still hungry afterwards. Poor Amy just kind of poked at her cuy like the biology student that she is and couldn´t really eat it because it still had a face, among other things...I had to tell her that she was awesome many times in order to make up for the fact that I dragged her up there to eat what had once been a giant, cuddly hamster. But it was an interesting cultural experience, as most of Peru has been.

written by  kfox on July 22, 2010 from Cusco, Peru
from the travel blog: Peru Adventure!
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Sandboarding down sand dunes in Huacachina

So, the next day, Amy and I took a bus down the coast a bit to Ica. Neither one of us particularly wanted to go to Ica (it´s not a very nice place and has a lot of crime), but our goal was to wind up in Huacachina, an awesome touristy town surrounding a desert oasis a few kilometers outside of Ica. Our plan was to meet up with Sarit, the girl we traveled to Arequipa with, in Huacachina, so Ica was just a stop on the way. The only thing worth mentioning about Ica was that it had bars on most of its windows and it is close to most of Peru´s wineries. Amy and I signed up for a wine tour and didn´t leave our room for the rest of the night.

The next day, our tourguide, a 25 year old manboy named Fernando, came and picked us up at our hostel. From there, he took us to three different wineries. The only one I remember was called Tacama, and the tour was actually a bit boring because it was a Sunday, so we didn´t actually get to watch anyone making wine. The different wines were interesting to taste though. The wine I have found most unique to Peru has to be Vino del Amor, or Wine of Love. This is a very sweet wine that is supposedly so delicious that people drink way too much and then in their sloppy states, make lots of babies. We had multiple people tell us at the first winery (Tacama) that we would fall in love with Peruvian men after drinking this wine and then make lots of babies. Amy and I just kind of smiled at each other uncomfortably. Meanwhile, as Amy got progressively more tipsy, Fernando started flirting with her, probably hoping to be the one that she would fall in love with. I laughed to myself and thought, "If only he knew."

At the second winery, we got a tour of a bizarre building cluttered with giant clay jars of wine and random antiques/ancient taxidermied animals. The man who owned the winery showed us the traditional way of removing the wine from the clay jars by dipping a bamboo stick with a strategically cut hole into the jar...the wine would collect in the bottom of the stick and then he would pour it into a cup for us. He gave us wine, flirted with Amy (ew, he was in his 50s at least) and, when Amy bought two bottles of wine, he gave us free clay shot glasses with the name of the winery on it...sadly I can´t remember the name now, but I do remember thinking that Amy had accidentally charmed two men so far, haha.

At the third winery (which was also a restaurant), another Fernando showed Amy and I how pisco (a liquor made from grapes) is made. Basically, the grapes are collected in a shallow pool-like structure and stepped on by a bunch of Peruvians until they are all squishy. The juice is channeled into another pool and then into a series of tubes, where it is distilled. About 50 percent of the liquor is used for drinking, while the extremely potent liquor and the very weak liquor on either end of the batch is mixed together and sold as cleaning alcohol. Amy and I tried a few different types of pisco. At this time, Fernando #2 asked what we were doing that night. We told him we would be in Huacachina and he asked if he could meet us in a discoteca there. We told him maybe to appease him. Then we ate lunch at the winery while also watching the final game of the World Cup (Holland vs. Spain) with Fernando #1. After delicately feeding Amy a piece of chicken off of his fork (it was creepy but she´s too polite to say no) we decided we´d like him to drop us off in Huacachina so we could be rid of him (he actually offered to drive Amy there by herself and come back for me later if I wanted to stay and watch the game...uh oh feeling? I think yes). After much awkward silence, he dropped us off at a hostel in Huacachina and gave Amy his phone number and email address. She died inside and I laughed, even though I secretly wanted to chase him out of the hostel and yell "She doesn´t like boys!!!" Or punch him in the face...either one, haha. Then we went downstairs and watched Spain beat Holland during overtime...well, I watched, and Amy wrote in her journal, looked up occasionally, and asked, "Are they done yet?" My girl is not a sports fan, hehe.

After the game, Amy and I had a small emotional crisis which occupied us until about 9 at night, after which point all the internet cafes were closed. This meant we could not find Sarit, who was supposed to arrive in Huacachina the same day...ooops. Feeling really guilty, Amy and I went to a restaurant whose walls were covered in paintings of fairies and elven creatures and whose occupants were all smoking marijuana. I had heard that it was easy to get marijuana in Huacachina, but I didn´t know they passed it out at restaurants, haha. Anyway, Amy and I tried Peruvian pizza, which is kind of like a giant cracker covered in tomato sauce, then walked around town a bit looking for Sarit, and went home when we were unsuccessful (sorry Fernando #2). Amy got hit on AGAIN by a man who worked in our hostel wearing an orange shirt, and every time we passed by him that night and the next morning (he was wearing the same shirt), he would exclaim, "AMY!" I think it´s safe to say that neither one of us wants to see a Peruvian man ever again.

The next morning, Amy and I hurried frantically to an internet cafe, where we found ten emails in my inbox from Sarit asking where we were and if we were alive. We found out where she was staying, rushed over there, and decided that we liked her hostel better because it didn´t have a creepy man in an orange shirt calling Amy´s name every five seconds. We checked out of our current hostel and moved our things, apologizing profusely to Sarit over and over. She was such a sweetheart about it. :) Our new hostel was also next to the lagoon, which was cool because our old one was not...Huacachina is actually a desert oasis, so it has a small lagoon surrounded by palm trees, hostels, and tourists. And best of all, giant sand dunes!

Amy, Sarit, and I went sandboarding later that day. What that entailed was climbing into a bizarre vehicle called a dune buggy, strapped ourselves into the seats, and holding on for dear life as the buggy drove spastically across the dunes, up and down some hills that definitely looked too steep to be going down, lol. Then once we were all ready to pass out, the driver stopped the buggy and retrieved a bunch of snowboards from the back of it. We rode these snowboards down the sand dunes on our stomachs! From the top of the dune, the steep slopes down looked terrifying, but once you got going, sliding down was really fun. My glasses fell off during one run and snapped in half, but it was still worth it. We also got to watch the sun set behind the sand dunes, which was beautiful...at least, what I could see of it without my glasses, haha. It was definitely one of my favorite parts of the trip so far. Anyway, I have to go now and I will be on the road for the next couple weeks, so I´m not sure how often I´ll be able to update. Much love to all of you and I´ll be back soon.

written by  kfox on July 24, 2010 from Cusco, Peru
from the travel blog: Peru Adventure!
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At least we got to see Sillustani before leaving Puno. Sillustani is a group of crumbling Incan and pre-Incan funerary towers. These groups of people used to bury important people in large towers...they would drop mummies of important figures in the top (along with several unlucky servants) and then cover the mummies with small rocks and clay. They would also fill the tombs with food and the dead´s possessions so that the dead would have food, etc. in their next life, and the Incas would replenish this food once a year or so. The Incans made these towers by lugging these giant, perfectly rectangular rocks up wooden ramps...it must have taken years to build one. Also, the got the rocks to be perfectly rectangular by drilling a hole into the rocks with a hand drill, inserting a piece of wood into the hole, and getting the wood wet so it would expand. Once it expanded, the wood would create perfect cracks in the rocks, helping the Incas to form perfect building bricks. Cool huh? Anyhoo, I´m going to get back to my sick girlfriend now. More later.

written by  kfox on July 26, 2010 from Puno, Peru
from the travel blog: Peru Adventure!
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