El Salvador (Part 2: Pupusas and other food)

Pupusas. The glorious pupusas of El Salvador. We ate them every day we were there except for two, and we never tired of them. Pupusas are the go-to snack and dinner food of El Salvador, and even the Costa Rican girl we met on the plane on our way there gushed about what she perceived to be one of the finer traditional foods of central America. I miss them already.

Tortillas vary from country to country, and from Mexico they seem to get thicker the further south you go. El Salvador likes a thick tortilla with a nice chew, and they are never white flour, only white corn or rice. I'd never encountered a tortilla made from rice meal before. A pupusa is the same dough as a tortilla, stuffed with a filling. You make a ball, poke a well into it, press in the desired fillings, then carefully pat it into a large flat disc without letting the filling escape the sides. The pupusa is fried on a flat top until it's crispy.

There's lots of filling options, but most commonly beans and/or cheese, and chicharron. Chicharron is throughout latin America but it's not the same thing everywhere, in El Salvador it's a highly seasoned shredded pork (in Peru chicharron is deep fried pork crackling). Other pupusa fillings include shredded chicken, roasted jalapenos, and a number of interesting green vegetables I'd never seen anywhere else.  Mora is like a stronger tasting variety of spinach. Loroco, which I love, is the green bud of a vine and tastes a lot like asparagus. Any of the above in the combination you desire, they make them to order. Three or four is a meal and they range in price from forty cents to a dollar each.

Nate eating a pupusa, Craig in the background.

On the tables in every pupuseria are the same accompaniments, a runny and slightly spicy tomato sauce, and always a big jar of awesome pickled cabbage slaw. This pickled cabbage is addictive, it's a mix of shredded cabbage, grated carrots, oregano, sliced jalapenos and sometimes cucumbers. It's spicy, vinegary, salty and is fantastic on top of a pupusa. You eat them with your hands, tearing off pieces and mopping up tomato sauce and topping your bite with a bit of slaw.
Google images of pupusas

We ate most of our San Salvador pupusas a few blocks from our guest house at the same pupuseria, the Rincon Familiar, (the "Family Corner"). It was a total neighbourhood hub and they aren't used to tourists at all. Our first day there the young woman served me with an icy sneer, but the next time we came back she looked surprised to see us and her demeanor transformed. Our absolute enthusiasm for the humble local food there pleased them, and they were lovely, hardworking cooks, standing over a sweltering flattop making tortillas and pupusas all day.

The fruit in El Salvador was amazing, unsurprisingly, and people are obsessed with smoothies, there are cheap licuado stands all over. We were a little early for mango season, there were some around, but they didn't compare with the sublime Peruvian ones. Avocados were mostly the small Hass variety that we all know well, the same as the main variety exported to Canada. The pineapples were the best I'd ever had in my life.

This cool looking yellow fruit is the fruit of a cashew tree - the trees produce two edibles, the nut and the fruit. The nut grows out of the bottom of the yellow fruit, you can see where the stem attaches underneath.

The fruit (right) and nut (left) of a cashew tree.

My fave breakfast at the Rincon Familiar: eggs scrambled with peppers, onions and tomatoes,
beans, soft fresh cheese with piping hot fresh tortillas. ($1.25)

Our final country, El Salvador. (Part 1)

There was a lot of anticipation for our time in El Salvador. Our only stop in central America, the country of Nate's birth, we allocated just shy of three weeks in this tiny country so that we could get to know it well without feeling rushed.  Nate was adopted from El Salvador to Canada as a wee baby and this was his first visit since he left.

I have a lot to say about El Salvador, it will take a few entries to get it out.   El Salvador has many different faces, and it has completely charmed me, but it took a few days to reveal it's many faces and seduce me. There are many problems here, and this tiny country has had far more than it's fair share of hardship, but people are the kindest and warmest that we have encountered in this four months of great people.We fly home to Canada the day after tomorrow, and I feel vaguely panicky, needing to get it out before any of the memories fade. We land in Toronto and I will spend a week in Sarnia, Ontario getting to know Nate's family and friends. I return to Vancouver on March 11th.

We had to change planes in San Jose, Costa Rica, and when we walked into the gate to catch the El Salvador flight we had a giggle, because, well...it was full of short, stocky guys that looked a lot like Nate.

We arrived around 9pm to a very confusing crowd of paparazzi. It was extremely weird to walk out of the airport into a huge crowd with cameras and be ushered out of the way, they were awaiting the imminent arrival of the Mexican soccer team. 

I have to admit my first impression of San Salvador wasn't great.  On our cab ride to the residential area where our guest house, Ximena's, was located, we drove a long boulevard for quite some time and I was taken aback by the endless row of American fast food restaurants. It wasn't just that they were ALL present, it was the sheer size of the restaurants, multi-story extravaganzas with gigantic kids play areas with  winding slides and elaborate play structures.  The north American fuel companies and all the big banks. (we were surprised that Scotiabanks are everywhere).  After seeing very little of this throughout the trip, it was disheartening to see. It felt like a successful corporate invasion had taken place. Thankfully, we came to realize that it's not like that everywhere, and the downtown historical district of San Salvador is completely different. It's isolated to certain areas.

Ximena's Guesthouse

El Salvador is the most populated country in central America, and the capital, San Salvador, is massive. In the different areas of the city the vast gulf between the rich and the rest is extremely apparent. While that contrast exists all through latin America I find it most visible here over the other places we've seen in these past months. The posh district of La Zona Rosa looks and feels like Beverly Hills. Giant sophisticated malls, luxury hotels and luxury car dealerships.  Highly groomed women languidly stroll the air conditioned malls sipping their iced Starbucks looking like they've never worked a day in their life. The poorest barrios have vast slums of shacks made of corrugated tin, plywood and foraged building materials, and kids with rotten teeth and runny noses run around drinking coca-cola.  The sprawling mercado centrale downtown goes on for blocks, and rival the markets in India for their liveliness, chaos, filth, and challenging odors.  Nate and I love the downtown market, but there is certainly a cap on the amount of time I can spend there...what starts off as exciting and endlessly fascinating becomes draining and overwhelming after a couple of hours of exploring.

Onion seller

vendor's stall of medicinals in mercado, San Salvador

Repairing clothing in the mercado in San Salvador

Pretty vegetables!

It's very hot here, 30 degrees+ every day, but the evenings cool off pleasantly.

Our guesthouse in San Salvador is a shabby but comfortable and spotlessly clean place called Ximena's. Kind, helpful people and a nice garden sitting area with a lot of trailing jasmine vines that smelled absolutely divine at night. Few tourists come to El Salvador as compared to other neighbouring countries so there isn't much tourist infrastructure to help you figure out transportation, etc, and the people are so helpful getting things figured out.

The neighborhood is a pleasant residential area with a few parks, museums and elementary schools. We quite like it, and quickly found the amazing pupuseria Rincon Familiar ("family corner") on our first day where we eat a lot. I'll write fondly about pupusas later.

downtown San Salvador

El Salvador is really small, the longest bus ride you can take here is five hours. San Salvador is so central that it's perfect to use as a base from which to see most of the country. A two hour bus ride to the coastline is under two dollars, and so it made sense for us to base here. We ended up spending a week there, leaving often to see things, and then five days at the beach in Barro de Santiago, and then five days in Santa Ana, and now we're finishing up in San Salvador tomorrow.  Ximena's offered to store our stuff so we downgraded to one backpack and left the rest there.

Atop El Puerto del Diablo,  near San Salvador.  You hike  to a viewpoint with a 360 degreee view,  you can see most of the country.

standard city bus

The buses are really fun to ride, a total riot. They are true chicken buses in the tradition of India, I once saw a man with a baby goat on his lap. They're all secondhand school buses from the states and independently owned and operated. A driver is designated (or chooses?) a route and sticks with it, it's painted all over the bus. Somehow the system works. As the drivers own their buses, they decorate them however they please and they're painted in garish fun colors with dramatic racing stripes and lots of accessorizing. The insides are plastered with a combination of Catholic slogans, images and plastic icons, lots of soccer banners and photos of their kids. There's a tendency for the drivers to passionately advertise the women they love, so it's very common to see a bus with "DAISY MARIA" or "CAROLINA" or "MARGUERITA" plastered across the side of the bus or the windshield in giant holographic letters. It's very cute. They drive like maniacs and a ride across the city costs twenty cents. People are crammed into the bus until they're hanging out the doors and there's a lot of camaraderie - everyone is hot and uncomfortable together. You just have to accept it and get into the spirit. A little girl barfed watery pink watermelon barf onto the floor and it splashed on my foot. Her mom was mortified and she looked miserable and they got off at the next stop - what am I going to do, freak out? I just washed it off when we got off. There are two air conditioned bus lines that take passengers to Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras, but within the country everyone uses these crazy public buses.

Something else I love about those crazy buses are the vendors constantly walk on and off selling all kinds of stuff. It's useful AND entertaining. You can get bags of cut fruit, juice, water, pop, candy, newspapers, ibuprofen, antifungal foot cream, back scratchers, toothbrushes, crayons. The list continues - maybe you want some shaved coconut, a piece of cake, marshmallows on a skewer (weird), bags of homemade awesome yucca or plantain chips with a squirt of lime juice and hotsauce for twenty five cents. Sometimes someone will stand at the front of the bus and advertise the news that one can read more of if they'll buy a paper, or the various merits of the black market antibiotics they're selling. On a bus. Hilarious.

Bus station 

We spent a lot of our time in El Salvador learning about the history and politics. It's particularly relevant there because it has directly impacted Nate's life, he was born in the middle of a civil war, in 1986, and a few months after a terrible earthquake. The war officially ended in 1992. The wikipedia entry is a pretty good summary of it if you want a refresher.

I was particularly fascinated by an underground radio station that started during the war. The war was terrible, and it was very difficult for Salvadorans around the country to get accurate news about what was happening in different areas. The government news was all lies, and so the FMLN (the alliance of guerilla groups attempting to overthrow the military dictatorship) started Radio Venceremos. Broadcast from a secret broadcast station in a cave in the mountains, the radio provided the only source of non-military news.  There was a constant effort to shut down the radio station, and the US even attempted to scramble the signal from aboard warships, but they failed in their attempts. International media eventually turned to the Radio Venceremos as a reliable source of information about El Salvador. In addition to political broadcasts, the radio station broadcasted information about homemaking, english classes, healthcare. It still broadcasts today.

The peace accord was signed in January 1992.  It was very interesting to be there just two weeks before a national election. The FMLN successfully transitioned from a guerilla group to a political party, and they are currently in power. Their main rival, ARENA, is a right wing group formed of the cronies and sons of some of the death squad leaders from the civil war.  Founded by Roberto d'Aubuission, who was responsible for terrible crimes against humanity that were never punished as he died before he could be tried.  While now ARENA is just a right wing party with conservative values and the needs of the rich few as the priority, I can't understand how anyone could  trust anyone from ARENA. Talking to people there about the current state of their politics it seems that the FMLN is well intentioned but idealistic and fiscally unrealistic, and ARENA is too conservative and doesn't take care of the many sick and poor campesinos (peasants). I'll be curious to see the outcome of the election next week.

A short little taste of Ecuador

Naturally, people you meet along the way will all share their experiences traveling, and inevitably you start to get expectations of a place. We met several people who didn't love Ecuador, and one girl who said the people in Quito were downright rude and unfriendly.  Our experience was quite the opposite, we loved it and left feeling that we wished we could have spent more time there. We only ended up going to Ecuador because it was so much cheaper for us to fly to El Salvador from Quito than Lima...and it being that we were already in Northern Peru it was nearly equidistant to take us up to Quito than back down to Lima.

When our bus crossed the border the vegetation instantly transformed, into banana plantations as far as the eye could see. For hours, endless banana farms. It was absolutely crazy. These monocultures will be the death of the earth.

Quito is a lush, green, tidy city with tons of public green space and fantastic public transit - extremely livable. The city is divided into Old Town and New Town.  New town is an easily navigated grid, whereas historical Old Town is a little more confusing.  Old town is a little sketchy for tourists, not in danger that could cause them any physical harm but rather a thriving and skilled pickpocket community.

City park on Saturday

We chose a hostel in the touristy New Town zone called La Mariscal for it's proximity to the bus station and airport. The hostel was a huge, sprawling old house, musty, funky and very cozy. Despite it being in a rather loud nightclub neighborhood we slept well there, it was a good place to be.

On Saturday we walked to one of the many large city parks to visit the botanical gardens and an interactive dinosaur museum. The day was overcast, mild and rainy, and it was refreshing after the intense heat of northern Peru.  The botanical gardens was a bit small, but beautifully designed and laid out and it was really pleasant. The interactive dinosaur museum was less an educational museum than a display of very cool animatronic dinosaurs. They made noises and moved through space and we were quite impressed by them, and watching the kids around us react to them was totally worth the visit.

Sunday was a nice sunny day and we set out to explore.  Most people take transit to get from La Mariscal to Old Town but we did it on foot as there was a few things we wanted to check out en route. I'm so glad we opted to walk it, because it made me really love Quito.  Without exaggeration, Quito has more public parks than any city I have visited. The powers that be in Quito have made it a very livable place for families. The parks are immaculate, free of litter or dog poop, with excellent modern playgrounds. The public trash cans are divided recycling garbages.  It being that it was Sunday the parks were jam packed with happy families and awesome food vendors. You can eat a great lunch in a city park -barbecue vendors sold tasty skewers of meat for 50 cents, there was fruit and juice vendors of course and grilled corn.

It took us nearly two hours to walk to Old Town, and it was beautiful with its typical colonial architecture and big fancy cathedrals, but it was really passing through the three huge, busy parks with all those happy people that made us feel amazing. In one of them there was a huge craft fair that sets up every weekend, and it had such a nice community feeling.

Something else that really impressed us is that every Sunday a major thoroughfare is closed to traffic for weekly cycling. It's called Ciclopaseo organized by a group called Ciclopolis, and it started as an initiative to get people active...there are bikes available for rent, and tourists can rent them too. There's water stations every few blocks, and outdoor aerobics classes in the parks.  As it was Sunday we got to see it, about
40 000 people participate! What a cool event. 

So we were only in Ecuador for three days, and it was only Quito, but it was a really nice time and made us want to go back some day and get to know the country better. On Monday afternoon we flew to San Salvador, El Salvador.

50 cents? Yes please!!!

nom nom nom!!

Quito Old Town

The last of Peru

Wow, that's a long time to go without writing. It's been driving me a bit nuts, Nate and I have been cracking jokes that my brain is going to explode. One morning he's going to wake up and my head will have exploded only instead of brains and blood splattered everywhere there will be words splattered all over the wall and bedsheets.

We loved our time in Huanchaco, the cozy, laid back fishing and surf village.

Nate bought a surprisingly nice guitar for $30 in Bolivia, and it's been really nice for him to have a guitar along. We were browsing a lot of beautiful instruments in a store on a quiet street in La Paz and realized they had a few inexpensive entry level guitars.  It has quite a nice tone, and it was a happy impulse buy when we realized how inexpensive it was.  He's been playing it a lot, and our time in Huanchaco turned out to be quite musically dynamic. We met a really nice guy in his forties named Yannic, from Germany. Yannic drives a taxi in Munich and saves enough money living lean to take six months a year in a warm place, and he was living in Huanchaco for the whole six months. He's an incredible classical violinst with the most hauntingly beautiful improvisational style, and Nate and Yannic jammed really well together. It was so organic, with no discussion or cue it would evolve and build, trading off back and forth who would lead the improv. They discovered each other when our friends Austin and Whitney were in town. Austin is a classically trained guitarist who also spent a few months in Cuba studying Cuban jazz guitar.  Austin was positively giddy when he learned that since last seeing us at Inti Warra Yassi in Bolivia Nate had acquired a guitar. He was playing Nate's guitar when Yannic came along and pulled out his violin. They took turns jamming together. Austin and Whitney continued on their way to Colombia that night, and Nate and Yannic met up a few more times to play together. It attracted a lot of attention. The hostel backyard opened onto an alley, and the gate was open. Shy, quiet fishermen and kids would accumulate in the alley to listen, and at one point a very excited Argentinean tango guitarist joined us to take a turn on Nate's guitar. It was so cool...that guy didn't speak a word of English but it didn't matter at all.

Our surfing is now at the level that we can practice without  instruction, but we spend most of our time paddling and falling off the board. It's a discouraging stage in the learning curve, but it's still fun.

We actually stayed a couple days longer than planned in Huanchaco because I was suddenly much too ill to travel. What started as some classic traveler's belly escalated into a pretty miserable intestinal infection (now that's some serious fun, ugh). It was likely food borne, we were eating a ton of uncooked seafood in the form of delicious ceviche, although we speculate it was some barbecued chicken. The little local hospital put me on some powerful antibiotics, three days of injections and a week of cipro, and within a couple days I was well enough to travel and a few days later back to normal. We have certainly had more than our share of health issues on this trip.We caught a bus up to Mancora and spent a few days there.

Huanchaco is a fishing town first, and a destination for serious surfers, and it's really mellow. Mancora is Peru's number one beach destination, and it's a resort town with a real party vibe and  raucous night life.  The atmosphere was like night and day between the two towns, and Huanchaco was more to our liking, however the beach itself was far superior. Huanchaco's beaches are actually pretty rocky and there's lots of sharp things and urchins to watch out for in the water, it's mediocre for swimming. The water temperature is kind of cold too, most people wear wet suits while they surf.  Mancora had a much warmer water temperature and silky soft sand and it was an absolutely incredible swimming beach, with delightful waves to play in.  I was still not feeling totally back to myself and the antibiotics made me feel really weird so I was really low key.

More happy reunions occurred in Mancora. I was sitting on the beach under a rented umbrella reading, and Nate was out frolicking in the waves and I looked up just in time to see him dash through the water and high five someone.  Then moments later he did it again, high fiving someone else. Within five minutes he reunited with a guy named Christoph from Austria that was on our bike trip in Bolivia and also at our hostel in Cusco, and with Josh and Becca from the same bike trip and our hostel in Lima. Aah, the well traveled gringo trail. It's fun to see familiar faces, but at the moment in little-visited El Salvador we see very few tourists and it's a cool getting an experience undiluted by the tourist-commerce that dominates any well travelled place.

We said goodbye to Peru and took two long buses for nearly twenty four hours to get us up to Quito, Ecuador.

Beautiful Lima and up to the beach

After Cusco we went to Lima, on a 22 hour bus ride. The best bus company, Cruz Del Sur, makes the long bus rides absolutely painless. In Peru there aren't as many main bus stations, all the companies have their own terminals. Everyone we met was using CDS and we were astonished at the calibre of the buses. It's not even expensive, but it's like first class on a plane, on a bus. An attendant, meal service, clean bathrooms, movies, blankets and pillows and big comfy seats. Quite deluxe.

We arrived in balmy Lima rested and found a hostel. All the backpacker hostels are in the chic and safe suburb of Lima called Miraflores. Lima central is still a little sketchy in parts and there are areas that tourists are advised not to walk at night, but overall it was much much nicer than we expected.   It feels as safe as walking around Kitsilano. It looks like San Diego, only everyone is speaking spanish and the food is even better. The beaches are clean and beautiful.

Once again we were absolutely blown away by the food.  Reminiscent of Cusco but with a lighter touch, and obviously lots of seafood as it's on the coast.  I understand why so many chefs are turning towards the food of Peru for inspiration. I would love to come up with a way to move there to work at some point because there are so many inspiring restaurants.  Evidence of the extent to which the fine dining scene in Lima has developed is the presence of several professional culinary schools, inlcuding a Cordon Bleu Lima.  Summers at Lake O'hara and winters in Lima!  If my old sous chef from Blue Water Cafe, Ricardo Valverde realizes his dream of moving back to Lima to open a restaurant I'll be on the phone signing up!

In Lima we had a few happy reunions. You tend to reconnect with people along the well-travelled gringo trail.  Whitney Ray and Austin Freese from Olympia, Washington were at Parque Machia at the same time as us, Whitney worked with spider monkeys and Austin walked a puma named Sonko. We really clicked with them and we were all pumped when we bumped into each other walking the beach in Lima. Eventually they sought us out at our hostel as they passed through Huanchaco and it was good to see them once again.

Josh Renfro and Rebecca Podesto from California were on our bike trip in La Paz, and we also instantly clicked that day so it was fun to discover them in our Lima hostel.

We're now in a lovely beach town called Huanchaco about 8 hours drive north of Lima. It's a humble fishing town with a big surfing scene. The biggest city in Northern Peru, Trujillo, is about 15km away. During the week it's a mellow surf town and on the weekend it completely fills up with jolly Peruvian families and teenagers coming to play on the beach. It has a very happy atmosphere. The beach is lined with dozens of delicious seafood restaurants and surf shops. We eat ceviche every day, you can get a combo lunch of a plate of ceviche, and a piece of corvina with rice and yucca for 10ns.  (it's 2.79 nuevo soles to the dollar)  The landscape is bizarre, kind of like the Baja Peninsula of Mexico, stark desert that meets the ocean.

We just missed the 2012 Pro Peru surf competition by two days. A massive event sponsored by Nissan and Ripcurl and the biggest cell phone service provider in South America. First prize was 30,000 USD. The bleachers and judge's stage was still set up when we arrived.  We were a little disappointed to have missed that.

We're staying in a little surf school called Un Lugar.  Juan Carlos has about five rooms he rents and we're basically in his home. It looks like a normal street entrance from outside but inside there are ramps and ladders to bamboo and palm frond treehouses. A row of trophies. One wall is about 30 surfboards. There's hammocks and reading nooks all over the place, lots of driftwood, weird tiki art and a little workout area with a yoga ball and a bunch of weights. A super tidy place, stacks of books everywhere. The main courtyard is open air and you can smell the ocean, we're less than a block from the beach. Nate was thrilled cause there are lots and lots of skateboards. (in addition to surfing Juan Carlos teaches kids to skateboard.) There are two kooky old macaws named Toto and Charlotte with clipped wings that are free to roam the whole compound.

I really enjoy watching Juan Carlos with the kids he teaches. Kids are out of school for the summer and there are swarms of kids coming in every other day for camp. As he's been teaching kids since 2000 he's seen many grow up, and teenagers pop in to say hi quite often, and sometimes do chores around the house so they can borrow surfboards and wetsuits.  They have this quiet reverence when they're around him, calm and respectful and he's amazing with them. It's beautiful to watch someone at ease and content in a mentoring role.

We had our first lessons with him a few days ago. I had one lesson in San Diego a few years ago and haven't been on a surfboard since. Our first hour was extensive theory and then we got in the water.  Juan Carlos is a really intense teacher, he pushed us hard, and we made a lot of progress in one day. I like how much he talks about attitude and the psychology of surfing, about patience with the ocean, our bodies, our minds.  I think Nate was expecting it to be a bit easier as his balance is already so stable on a longboard but he was falling plenty too. The waves have been massive lately, the beach is even flying the red flag to stay out of the water in areas and also we're STILL sore from our first lesson, but we hope to get back at it tomorrow.
http://www.unlugarsurfschoolperu.com/

We happen to be here during the month of festivities that honor the patron saint of the city, Santísima Virgen del Socorro. There are lots of fireworks and firecrackers, and a few days ago they walked a giant icon through the city on the shoulders of some very weary looking men. A brass band followed and the whole town turned up for the event. The following day they set up a huge, very formal stage with the icon, a lot of flowers and fabricated an outdoor church. There was a massive crowd and they gave mass beside the beach.

I'm actually caught up to the present!  Wow!  We need to be up in Quito by the 13th to catch our flight to El Salvador. We're debating staying here for a few more days and then going straight to Ecuador so we actually get to see it for a few days before we catch our flight, but we love Peru and kind of want to stay as long as possible. There's another beach town another six hours north of here that has a considerably warmer water temperature so we might go to Mancora for a few days.

Cusco and its beautiful food.

I've been really excited for the Peru portion of our trip for lots of reasons.  My love for my dear friend Jinny and her family have made me feel connected to Peru in some way...it just means a lot to me to see this place. The food is also very inspiring.  We had high expectations for the food and we have only found them to be surpassed.  We have been really excited for the beaches of northern Peru, too.  I'm not surprised that I love it here.

Our time in Peru started in Cusco, the sacred capital city of the powerful Inca.  It's a beautiful city, nestled in a deep green valley.  The juxtaposition of Spanish and Incan architecture makes for amazing city walks.  It's a very culinary city and Nate and I saw numerous beautiful restaurants we would love to work at. Sleek dining rooms with tasteful incorporation of Incan art and incredible pottery. Elegant modern menus with intriguing Peruvian ingredients totally foreign to us. We couldn't afford to eat in those fine dining restaurants but we could tell we could tell the cooks are very accomplished by the complexity of the menus.

Don't misunderstand me - we didn't mind not partaking in the fancy stuff one bit - the food in the casual family restaurants and markets was excellent.  Aside from a professional intrigue in the calibre of restaurants, the rewarding experiences meeting local people and chatting in markets is far more interesting and fun than being served by a coolly professional waiter. It was just impressive to see the high end.

Cusco's vast main mercado, the San Pedro market, is in a typical cavernous warehouse, but the sunlight slanted through the eaves casting the most beautiful ribbons of sunlight across the lanes of produce and food.  Nate and I always seek out the mercados in every city immediately, they all have their own personality and I always feel giddy when we explore them.  On that first day in Cusco, it was immediately apparent that the food in Peru was at a completely different level than we'd experienced so far on the trip.  A pleasant addition to the usual vendors was a long row of chocolate and coffee vendors, grinding coffee beans to order and selling sweets made with coffee. The chocolate was dazzling, blocks of different grades of rough baking chocolate, bars of every imaginable variety of eating chocolate, cocoa in every state from whole beans, to rough nibs to silky mounds of fine cocoa powder sold in bulk. This section of the market smelled incredible. 

There were the usual rows of stalls serving food, and we had the most incredible bowls of soup.  We were a little bit chilly (Cusco was quite cold) and a row of women were all serving variations of the same chicken soup, for just under $2. Their hands glossy with chicken fat, the women beckoned cheerfully,  and we plopped ourselves down for some soup with little persuasion.  The caldo de pollo was basically just chicken noodle soup, but the perfection of every component in it was what elevated it to something worth rhapsodizing about. In huge bowls she dumped a big mound of basic cooked spaghetti, a generous mound of spears of perfectly cooked yellow and orange carrots, fine slivers of raw red onion, and a perfectly braised whole chicken leg. Over it all she ladelled steaming chicken broth from her giant simmering cauldron, and topped it all off with a generous handful of chopped flat-leaf parsley.  This was perfection, largely because of the incredible flavour of her beautiful golden broth with no small amount of glistening beads of chicken fat. Around us people just dug in to their soup and pulled apart their chicken legs with their fingers and made little mounds of bones, and add pickled chilis to taste.  It really was perfect soup.

Herbal medicine was a big part of this market and there was a lane of vendors with mounds of fresh and dried herbs and a scale. The herbalists would confer and assemble paper packets of scaled out mixed herbs to prepare as a decoction in much the same manner as a Chinese herbalist.  Unsurprisingly, a food being heavily marketed in north America as one of the "new" superfoods, maca, is everwhere, as it's been a part of the diet here for thousands of years.  It quite expensive to buy in Canada, I know as I've been taking it for a few years now. It's inexpensive and abundant here.

A Cusco street snack we really got hooked on were hard boiled quail eggs. Women push little carts with a simmering pot of water and you get six eggs for 1 neuvo sole, which is about 30 cents. They're served peeled and still warm with a shake of salt and a squirt of this really delicious, tangy mint-based hot sauce.

Worth mentioning was the huge Inca museum where we spent a whole afternoon browsing the artifacts, textiles and mummies. Photos were prohibited and many guards were policing that rule, so we don't have any photos of the cool stuff we saw.

The streets of Cusco are bizarrely dichotomous. On one side of town you have a concentration of the main places tourists want to see, and therefore most of the hotels and hostels are over there.  The intact historical buildings are all close together.  Around the main city square there are several huge colonial buildings and a very beautiful cathedral, but there is also a Starbucks, KFC and a McDonalds.

Luckily our hostel was a solid twenty minute walk away from there through the Cusco of present day Peruvians, a wholly different place.  The hostel was fantastic, but we also loved that it was located far from Tourist Central, so we really got to see a different side of life. The sidewalks are cluttered with vendors.  The unemployment rate is terribly high in Peru so people are very industrious, selling stuff freelance. On the sidewalk you can buy anything from beautiful homemade cakes, fruit and vegetables and all manners of household stuff.  Our hostel had a great kitchen to cook in and we made some fantastic food while we were there...including a really cozy sit down family style dinner with some people we met.  Cusco had epic rainstorms almost every day we were there and the air temperature was cold, so it was nice to be in a place where we could make comfort food out of the beautiful ingredients at hand.  There was a complication with the boxes we sent home via Bolivia post so we ended up staying longer than planned. Rather than continue on when the possibility existed that we would need to head back to La Paz to sort out our boxes we hung out in Cusco until it was resolved. Luckily we didn't end up needing to go back and after a week we continued on to Lima.  It also had the most comfortable beds of this whole trip so we were in a good place, there are certainly worse places to be stranded.

The baking of Peru has proven to be a total delight, they make beautiful bread here. They love to use a really high shine egg wash on everything, it all just glows, and baked darker brown than the anemic-looking blond breads of Argentina.  You don't see many loaves, everything is in portions, all manners of rolls perfect for big crunchy sandwiches.  The sweets are incredible too, and often contain dulce de leche and coconut.  They bake a lot with apples and there are all kinds of flaky pastries with apple fillings and cakes with big wedges of apple baked into them.  The churros of Cusco are totally distinct to any we've seen anywhere else and we ate far too many of them. Imagine a buttery yeasted dough similar to brioche, rolled into an elongated croissant shape, filled with a stripe of dulce de leche and deep fried to order. They're outrageous, they pull apart like a croissant, get rolled in raw sugar and have a crunchy outside. So good.

We didn't go near any of the cevicherias in Cusco, as the ocean was far too distant for us to trust the fish, raw or cooked. Now that we're on the coast line we can't get enough of it, but I'll get to that soon.

the last of Bolivia

Hi!

I haven't written in a while, and plenty has happened.

We stayed nearly a week in La Paz. For a city of its size, it's a pretty pleasant place, the dazzling blue sky had no trace of smog. Despite the stern admonitions in our Lonely Planet book about it not being very safe, it felt fine to us. We stayed in a hostel about ten blocks out of the core of downtown and the big central market wasn't far and we did a lot of walking. 

La Paz is really striking because it's in a deep basin of valley.  During the day the red brick buildings climb steep cobblestone streets with towering cliffs above. At night those same buildings are transformed into a glittering amphitheatre of lights.  It's really pretty, and although we never got a perfect unobstructed view, magnificent Mount Illimani presides over the city at the end of the valley in her snowcapped glory. Even in the distance, at 6438m, she towers over the city.

On one Saturday afternoon we walked clear to the other side of the city, through the loud bustle of the downtown and out the other side. On a quiet leafy street in the university neighbourhood we discovered by chance a little nook of a Korean restaurant. It was a bit of a splurge but it presented a nice change of culinary pace as the food in Bolivia isn't particularly memorable and is very repetitive, so we ate lunch.  The food was spot on! Stuffed full of rice and kimchi we kept walking and found an incredible expanse of park.  We sat at the top of a hill and had a clear view of no less than 6 soccer fields (smaller than a standard field size) and we watched a men's recreational league playing their games. They were amazing! Unsurprisingly, in a country that takes the game very seriously the calibre of the recreational athletes is impressive.  Our walk continued through a huge arts complex with galleries and exhibition halls and we were transfixed by an amazing mural of the history of Bolivia. A memorable day.

The tough thing about La Paz was the altitude...we were both taken aback by how winded we were. Our hostel dorm was up four flights of stairs and we would always huff and puff.  Headaches and general fatigue persisted for days and I eventually went to the pharmacy to obtain some altitude sickness pills. An instant transformation - the relief of being able to breathe normally.

Feeling healthy again, we were ready to tackle the World's Most Dangerous Road. Sound scary? It certainly was. Being a single lane highway that crawls along the wall of a deep valley with sheer drops of up to 600m, it was coined that gruesome name because of the terrible traffic accidents that occurred.  There are pullouts every few hundred metres or so, but the hairpin turns were lethal, on average 300 deaths a year.  There is now a new, safer road, and the while the old road is still in use by the people who live in the villages along it, it's mostly used for cycle tourism now.  This bike trip starts up in the mountains in chilly winter conditions and ends 64km later, after descending 3600m to the warm and humid valley floor. As an avid cyclist riding this road had been on Nate's priority list since we started planning our trip many months ago.  We had a plethora of cycle touring companies to choose from and they are mostly using old substandard bikes and underqualified guides - we had budgeted for the best.  Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking was amazing - we were riding on Kona full suspension mountain bikes that are maintained daily and our guides were excellent, it's apparent why they have an unblemished safety record.  They were the company that started the bike tours on this road and the rest of the companies came after.  I was nervous - obviously I can ride a bike but I don't very often and this road is really technical.  The first 20km is on paved highway but the official "old road" is 44km of rough downhill gravel and no protection from going over the edge.We spent the first hour on safety and technique and I felt fine and ready when we started.  The views changed throughout the day, from towering snowcapped peaks, all the way down to the lush valley floor. I'm so glad I decided to do it, initially I was sitting on the fence but several girls I've met along the trip who shared my trepidation loved it and were really reassuring.  It was an incredible day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yungas_Road

Our La Paz hostel dorm room turned into a little enclave of Canadian awesomeness. We met a really nice group of people. Emily Tufts and Ben Gamble of New Brunswick were great, and loved our photos and stories of Parque Machia so much they made the decision to change their flights, extend their trip and they arrive tomorrow at the park to volunteer with the animals for a month.  Carly Rudolph's dear friend Blair from Vancouver was a total surprise of small world coincidence...it was upon discussing Lake O'hara that we realized we shared a common friend.
edited to add: received news from Emily and Ben, Emily has been placed with Gato and Ben will be walking Balu, the Andean bear! They're very excited.
We made the decision to ship our camping gear home and the boxes were pricy, but it was a relief to lighten the load of our heavy packs as we won't be using that stuff anymore. 

From La Paz we took a series of buses to take us to Copacabana on the shore of Lake Titikaka. A humble little fishing town of kind and welcoming people, we made it a short pit stop on the way to Peru because we wanted to get a good look at this massive lake.  It was picturesque and relaxing and you could get an amazing meal, a pan fried whole trout with rice, salad and potatoes for just under $3.  This was without question the tastiest trout we'd ever eaten.

The Bolivia-Peru border was the most relaxed border crossing yet...there was barely a fence. I have never seen a border with so little formality.

And to Cuzco we went, the famous headquarters of the Inca.