Happy birthday to Helga, first of all!


Cusco is wonderful but tomorrow I am leaving it already, for now, cause I´m going on a three day rafting trip on the Apurimac, one of the top ten rafting rivers in the world. I´ll be back on Tuesday evening. I´m going with perurafting.com. From their site (in bad English):

"Rafting and kayaking the rivers of Peru will be an unforgettable experience that you will really enjoy. The waters that flows down from the Andes form the mighty rivers of Peru and Chile, an authentic and irresistible challenge for lovers of rafting and kayaking , is an experience that will put you on the edge of risk and danger.
Among this Rafting Peruvian rivers is the Apurimac river, a classic class IV & V , run that drops through house sized granite boulders with canyon walls soaring thousands of feet above. It is rated among the 10 best rafting trips in the world and the number one Rafting trip in Peru.
This Peruvian river for rafting is born on the summits of the glaciar Misti only 100 km from the Pacific Ocean and cuts across the Andes of the South American Continent flowing directly into the Amazon river making it the longest river in the world.
You will feel the vertiginous fury of the waters , the raft quivers, jumps , sifts and you have to row with perseverance and passion, while your heart accelerates its beats and you grit your teeth."

Just arrived in Cusco after an 8 hour bus ride. Again it was a pretty irritating one. Like I said, not my preferred company, so it stopped every five meters to pick people up. Most horribly, at some point some woman entered with a big bag on her back. She put it down on the platform right in front of my seat, opened it, and the next moment she was hacking on its contents with a large butcher´s knife. Apparently there was some dead animal in there - fortunately hidden from my sight - which she was chopping up and selling to the passengers. I put my fleece in front of my eyes because the scene was too horrible (as were the smells and the chomping sounds), and the one time I looked, she reached over my seat with her hand to give some grisly, bony meat - or meaty bone - to the person behind me. I was briefly reminded of the Aztec sacrifices where the priest takes the heart of the victim and holds it in the air... Quite disturbing.

Tonight I am staying in Hotel Los Ninos (ninoshotel.com), which is way above my budget, but the profits go to a project with street children, so I figure it´s ok for one night. I´ll look for another place tonight or tomorrow. Now it´s chowtime.

stay beautiful

T

Foodieblog...
As I have to get up early tomorrow, I should be in bed by now. Besides, I sleep less well at this altitude, I noticed. But I can´t hit the sack yet, cause I over-ate, and I need to blog as I want to saveguard this culinary experience for posterity and my own memories.
Often when I eat, my stomach and my tongue start as allies, but end up disagreeing. My tongue wants me to keep eating as long as the food tastes good, but after a while my stomach may be protesting.
Tonight I started off with a big salad consisting of raw spinach, cucumber, lettuce, tomato, avocado, some strange but tasty vegetable called kaiwa, and other stuff. I let it follow by a kind of curry made with soy meat, koriander, garlic, vegetables, quinoa, sweet potato and yam, accompanied by a glass of red wine. There were a couple of vegan desserts on the menu, and as they were as usual pretty cheap, I took two. First came slices of orange that were to be dipped in chocolate sauce. The sauce, made with pure chocolate and mint, was the best I ever tasted. It was kind of messy to eat, and I positively ruined a napkin (all the more because I also used it to clean up spilled wine). Second was a dish consisting of apples baked in cognac, with raisins, nuts and blackberry sauce. Together with this I drank a huajspata, a warm drink with red wine, pisco (a local alcoholic specialty), orange juice and cinnamon.
Apart from the size of my stomach, my sweet tooth, and my spoiled tastebuds, I have only two excuses for this irresponsible case of gluttony: 1. it was raining very heavily and I couldn´t leave the restaurant, so I had to keep on eating. 2. twice, a beggar knocked on the restaurant door, and the wonderful waitress gave them free food. Without people patronizing this restaurant, this generous behaviour wouldn´t be possible :-)
The restaurant - called El Sol Interior or The Inner Sun, is kind of spiritually/religiously inspired. On their menu one can read: ´lo que buscas esta en tu corazon´, or ´what you are looking for is in your heart´. Good that it´s not in our stomach, cause there I certainly wouldn´t know how to find it there, at this point...

Oh, something I read in this Coelho book I mentioned. I have thought of this myself, but this guy put it nicely: something like ´...the sweetness of wine, which makes it easier for us to say and hear difficult things...´. Indeed, that is one of alcohol´s functions. Nothing wrong with alcohol, when consumed in moderation. On the contrary, it may help us to be true.

Did a guided tour today of Titicaca, visiting the Uros and Taquina islands. Actually I dislike guided tours. They make me feel like a tourist - which in a sense of course I am. Anyway, Titicaca is nice, but it´s, well... a lake. A lake trying to be a sea. You don´t really notice that it´s a lake at 4.000 m above sea level, so it is just a lake. The Taquina island is just an island, while the Uros islands are man-made islands, made from reed. However, this is now mainly a tourist attraction. So sum total: not really worth my time I guess, and certainly not worth five hours on a boat. Of course, I had some things you just have to see in order to know you wouldn´t have missed anything if you hadn´t :-) I´ll wash this down with a nice glass of wine and a good meal in a minute... Puno has cosy restaurants - obviously, the vegetarian ones do no fall under that category, unfortunately. But at least I had a great meal yesterday. Mashed potatoes, for the first time! Didn´t realize how I had been missing them till I tried them again.

Finished Paulo Coelho´s ´A las orillas del rio Piedra me siento y llore´, which I can recommend. It´s about love :-)

The bus company I am normally using doesn´t do busses to Cusco for a month, so I am scheduled for another bus. Touching wood. It´s another eight hour ride. If they´re gonna stop every five paces I´m going to screaaaaaam.

Daddy, happy birthday!

Hungry. Catch you later, amigos...

This morning I left Arequipa, and I just arrived in Puno, the Peruvian gateway to the Titicaca lake, at 3.800m above sea level. Heather will remain a couple more days with Johanna and we will meet up later again in Cusco.
I had a great time in Arequipa, mainly because of Johanna´s kindness. It is so great when people you randomly meet online, turn out to be wonderful persons in real life. I knew Johanna was a very kind person, but in real life she was even better than expected, and it is hard to express my fondness and gratitude towards her for what she did for me and heather. I hope to get better at expressing those things, some time...
Tomorrow I´m going for a tour on the lake and visit some of the Titicaca islands, and the next morning it´s finally off to Cusco.

Yesterday was world animal´s day I believe, because it is also the day of St Francis. I visited a church of St Francis here, and came across the Spanish version of the so called Prayer of St Francis. (a wonderful prayer/poem, google it up if you´re interested). In the Spanish version, there is one wonderful sentence not figuring in the English or Dutch one. It is:
´olvidandose se encuentra´ en betekent zoveel als ´forgetting one´s self one finds one´s self´. Prachtig he ;-)

going to search for some food...

all the best a todos!

Couple of more pictures. Here´s a view on Arequipa, with the Misti Volcano in the background.



















Heather and Johanna.

I´ve been with Heather in Arequipa for three days now, staying with Johanna, my internet-friend (or previously only internet friend, at least). Our last stop, Ica, was kind of a miss. I just wanted to briefly stop there for a particular museum, but it never opened that day. Also, I was a bit sick in the stomach. So at the Plaza de Armas - or town square - I lied down on a bench, till a security guard said I couldn´t do that. He left and I lied down again. He saw me, told me I had to get up, and I said I was feeling sick. He said if you are sick you have to go to the hospital. I stayed down, so he said ok then I´ll call an ambulance. I said yeah, as if... but ten minutes later the ambulance was there. Anyway, we left before we got into trouble...
At five pm we got back on the bus, and a horrible ride it was this time. The driver put on a DVD of five Jackie Chan movies, and if I hadn´t asked him to stop it as no one was looking, it would´ve played all night – as did the music. The bus stopped every two hours and then people got up, crying loudly to sell whatever they were selling, before disappearing again. Of course all the time the lights went on. So when I leave tomorrow for Puno, I´m taking a more expensive bus.

Anyway, now I am still in Arequipa, which is a very nice city, its horizon dominated by the 5800 high El Misti volcano, and some other snow capped mountains. Our host, Johanna is a wonderfully sweet girl. Staying with a family is a different and interesting experience. Her father runs a business that publishes school books, and I´m going to take some to the orphanage I´m going to in Cusco. We had some days of rest here and hung around the city, visiting the Santa Catalina convent, rowing a boat, seeing some churches... Yesterday Heather and I cooked for the family and they seemed to like it a lot. The mother, a very sweet woman, spoils us with good food (the first time it was hard to get around a soup with beef stock, and I had a few spoonfuls before I put it aside, and yesterday we had to refuse a gelatine-dessert).

So tomorrow I leave for Puno, the main city near the Peruvian side of the Titicaca lake. The day after or two days after I will leave for Cusco.