Quinoa, papas & pancakes

The food we eat in Peru...

Breakfast, Danish style. Plus coca powder and tropical fruits.

Quinoa soup.

Again quinoa soup, but this was the best in the world. Mixed with milk and cheese.

Quinoa again...

Huge Peruvian portions. With trout and chuños, a kind of dried potatoes that can keep for years.

Trout again.

Carachi soup. A native fish of  Lake Titicaca.

More fish.

The most delicious fried cheese! with purple potatoes, which are kind of sweet.

Horse bean, chuño and potato buffet.

'Mate de muña', very good for the stomach.

No need to comment.

First time making pancakes.

The last time we made pancakes. The portions are growing for each time... 65!

Cake can also be found in Peru, but nowhere near the Danish cakes ;)

An unexpected trip to a mountain village

Last Friday we were invited by a nice family we met in church the Saturday before, to eat breakfast with them at the market where they sell chicken. Or so we thought. So we got up at 6am, ate a small breakfast and walked the 5km to town. There we met the father of the family, and after a few pictures together with his friends, we went to his house. There they asked us if we wanted to go visit their relatives in a village in the mountains for lunch. So apparantly we had misunderstood the breakfast at the market part, and this was turning out to be a full day excursion. But it turned out to be an awesome experience in a tranquil mountain village. We were met by their very friendly relatives in a cute house, lying in a valley. The mother was weaving a beautiful coloured rug. And after they gave us some delicious homebaked bread and mango, we went for a hike up a hill. Up to 4270m. The view from the top reached all the way to Ilave, the town we had come from. And the fact that there were wild pumas and vicuñas (a type of llama) in the area, made the trip more adventurous, although we didn't see any. On our way down, the guys (including Andrés) helped herd some sheep from another hill side. When we came back to the cottage, we had a humungous lunch, with fried trout, tons of potatos, large green beans, maize and vegetables. And second dish we got fish soup with a carachi fish lying in each bowl. Carachi is a native fish of Lake Titicaca. The food was delicious. And yes, Andrés ate the trout and the fish soup! All of it. 

After a relaxing afternoon, we drove back to the town. It got a bit late because they stopped at a friend's house to talk. We tried to find a taxi or bus back to our house, but there were none. So we had to half run, half walk back, with very dark clouds all the way around us, all with flashes of lightning and very loud thunder claps in them. We were walking in very open country and felt pretty exposed. But we prayed for God's protection, which we always can trust in, but sometimes is hard to do. He protected us the whole way, and instead of a frightening storm, we were walking through a spectacular light show. And we reached home in time before the rain started pouring down.

Our friend Jaël from Ilave tries on his mother-in-law's homemade poncho.

On our hike up the hill, where Bhone was practicing with his homemade slingshot, used for the sheep.

While the guys were out herding sheep, Shandy and Maria tried a conversation with very bad Spanish (by Maria) and a few English words (by Shandy). But she was cool to try and understand Maria's attempt at Spanish.

Carnival in the fields

Last Thursday we were invited by a guy who works for the government at our village, to a carnival close to his village. At the moment all the villages around here have carnivals with dancing, drinking and music. At this village, we started first at one community building where they danced, then they walked along a road through the fields to meet another dancing group from another village. It went on till dark and it all culminated in the dancers throwing things into the audience - things like 3liter soda bottles, watermelons, huge tuna cans, all hurtling towards our heads in the dark! And most of the dancers were drunk. It was crazy! I protected myself behind Andrés and he stood ready to catch anything flying towards him. He only caught something by his leg though, something that came flying down low and hit him. No harm done. But people do get hurt we heard. 

The children were also running around with cans of snow spray and filling people's faces with it. See the last picture, where the grown-ups are also going crazy with snow spray.

Juli

After a fieldtrip at a town called Juli about 25km from where we live, where Andrés interviewed people selling Cañiwa at the market, we decided to hike up one of the hills surrounding the town. We hiked up a hill called the Sleeping Lion (León Dormido). We reached 4075m, around 200m above Juli. There was a really nice view of Lake Titicaca from the top, and of a village lying on some sort of delta, where we were told there was a large market for cocaine, before Fujimori (Peruvian president 1990-2000) partially removed it. Because of this market there are some very rich people living there. I read a book of an anthropologist who studied fishermen at Lake Titicaca, where he visited a ‘cocaine village' and was escorted from and back to the border of the village by heavily armed guards. Probably not a village we’re going to visit. 

More from Alpaccollo

To know more precisely where we are, click here, to see where we are on google maps.
And a couple of pictures too:

Our house is the one with red roof on the left.

Just by our place, there is a small pond, full of birds and toads that together form a peculiar choir.

Our home in Peru for a few weeks

Alpaccollo:

Instead of going to La Paz on Sunday the 8th as planned, Andrés got some good contacts in several villages, so we stayed in Peru and moved to an office building in a small village. This is our home for a few weeks, and then we plan to go further up in the mountains where Cañiwa (the crop Andrés is studying) is grown. While we’re here Andrés will interview people at marketplaces who sell Cañiwa and possibly also go to a village that processes Cañiwa in a stone mill. More about that later.

We have already bought Cañihuacu at the market, and as soon as we find a cow in the village from which we can buy milk, we’ll be starting our mornings with a warm Cañihuacu drink. Cañiwa is a very nutrious grain filled with proteins among other things, so apparently a bowl Cañihuacu milk would be enough for breakfast here – and they eat huge portions of food in this area!

We also bought a 5liter gas tank and a small stove, because this place is without kitchen, warm water and wifi – only a slow ethernet internet. Moreover, they wash the wooden floors here with petrol!! So one morning, after I had a night with a sick stomach, they changed the room next to ours into a gas chamber! I was ready to jump in and safe the guy cleaning the room if he stopped breathing, because that’s how I felt, like either not breathing the toxic air or throwing up. But it seemed normal for them to do a thing like this. I got Andrés to tell them not to wash our floor before we have left the village.

Here are a few pictures of the area where we live. 

This is the place where we live. Our room is in the building to the left. 

The rainy season is upon us, with awesome hale and thunder storms. We hope to hike the mountain seen in the distance one day. 

A boat trip on Lake Titicaca

Los Uros:

While we were in Puno and Andrés was taking a relaxing day to take care of his altitude sickness, I went on a boat trip on Lake Titicaca to visit an island made completely of totora reeds. The people on these islands are called Uros, they put layers and layers of totora reeds on top of each other to make an island, and they anchor the island to the bottom of the lake, so they don’t flow to Bolivia, as they told us at their presentation of their lifestyle. Their houses and boats are made of the reeds and they eat them as well, which apparently are very healthy and cause the Uros to hardly ever become sick. 

The leader of the village presented a miniature version of their island and how it is made.

The women and children performed a song for us. 

We took a boat ride on one of their boats made of totora reeds. See how small their island is. 

They sold woven blankets which contained stories of their lives. 

The kids had summer holidays at the time. They usually go to a school on another island. 

Taquile:

Later on we went to another island calle Taquile. Now this was the day after my sunburn incident and I was still feeling the altitude. So as the sun grew stronger in the middle of the day and we had to hike to the top of the hill of the island to the restaurant where our lunch awaited, I felt the fatigue upon me. I had been a bit nervous whether I would survive this day, with sunburn, tiredness and the altitude. But the other people on the trip were so fun and friendly even though I couldn’t communicate much with them. But we still had conversations with a mixture of hand gestures, Spanish, English and French. I’m certain God blessed me that day and gave me an awesome trip in spite of it all. 

Because the Spanish chopped down many of the trees during their conquest several hundred years ago, to use in the mines, many of the original slow-growing trees have been depleted and instead mostly foreign faster-growing varieties are seen in the area. As you can see on this picture, the island is packed with Eucalyptus trees. I almost felt like ‘home’ (if I could call Australia home).