Restaurant Gustu

A few weeks ago Andrés was invited to dine at Restaurant Gustu along with some Amaranth farmers who were in consideration of selling their crops to the restaurant. Gustu is a restaurant in Zona Sur, the wealthier part of La Paz, and was started by an organisation called Melting Pot Bolivia which was created by Claus Meyer. If you're Danish you'll know who Claus Meyer is - the professional chef and co-founder of Noma, which has been voted best restaurant in the world in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014. Melting Pot Bolivia is an initiative he started, to train locals to be chefs, using the rich variety of ingredients that are produced in Bolivia, with a main focus on native foods. One of those is amaranth, which was the reason Andrés came along with a group of farmers to Gustu, and ate there for free! He also has interviewed Melting Pot Bolivia in relation to his thesis, as cañahua is one of the ingredients they use in their haute cuisine, mainly for bread making.

Even though it is an expensive restaurant, its philosophy behind it is really interesting. They support only small Bolivian producers, not only in the food ingredients, but also in the decoration, furniture, etc. in the restaurant. Many of their products are organic as well, and they educate underprivileged locals as chefs. The service is the best we have ever experienced in a restaurant, they even served gluten-free food for Maria, but of course you pay for it.

After knowing all this, we had to go there together, as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And we enjoyed it!

The paintings behind the staircase and behind the colourful lamp are actually paintings of Dronning Margrethe (the Danish queen). When she visited Gustu for her birthday, it was arranged for many Bolivian painters to paint her in different versions, many of which she is depicted as a Cholita (Aymara woman) and so on. I think there are perhaps 20 paintings of her standing on the wall. It looked pretty cool.

The pillows have typical colours/patterns used for blankets here. And they're probably alpaca or llama wool.

As you can see, there is a picture of a Cholita for the women's toilet, and fresh little towels for each time you dry your hands.

I'll try to explain what I remember of the dishes. From the top right: 1. alternative menu with pictures of the main ingredients used in each dish. 2. A small appetizer with glazed onions and herbs on top of dehydrated cabbage leaf. 3. gluten-free cañawa buns with homemade quinoa butter, coca butter and regular butter. 4. Caramelised boiled carrots. 5. Trout, probably from Lake Titicaca. 6. Different types of native potatoes with a potato sauce. 7. Amaranth cream with juicy tiny tomatoes and dehydrated crunchy leaves of celery. 8. Racacha root with some kind of a delicious sauce under it, apple sauce next to it and cinnamon on the side (to represent the earth that the root came from). 9. A dessert of goat cheese ice cream with lettuce and sugar crumble on top. There was also one more dessert, a nice pineapple icecream, but we forgot to take a picture of it. All this (with more details) was explained to us by the waiters each time they came in with a new dish - sometimes it was the apprentice chef her-/himself that came out and explained the dish to us. 

The kitchen with an open view for the guests to see what was going on inside. The picture is taken from our table.

Field work in Ingavi

The last two weeks I (Andrés) have been away for a few days interviewing cañahua producers in the Ingavi province. The farmers are mainly subsistence farmers. PROINPA, the foundation I am colaborating with here in Bolivia, is helping the farmers to produce more and better and sell cañahua directly to a company, so they can improve their livelihoods.

PROINPA is distributing seeds from a variety called Illimani (the orange coloured above), but the producers still grow the traditional local varieties, like the red shown above to the right, or the yellow below to the left. Some still grow in the traditional manner, that is with a mixture of varieties (below to the right), in order to assure the harvest, as each variety is more sensitive and more resistant to different factors. So however the weather, soil conditions or plagues are, at least one of the varieties will perform well. Even though this technique is clever enough, it makes it difficult for commercialization and is normally abandoned.

The harvest is manual as well as all the different processes to finally obtain the clean seeds. It is a lot of work that often is not well paid. Therefore many farmers cultivated the plant only for self consumption. However, now more and more farmers are engaging in the cañahua production as the price is increasing and they are getting organically certified, thanks to PROINPA, so they can sell directly to a company and obtain a better price.

Until now the little but main income of these communities was livestock, though maybe in a few years cañahua will become an important income of these farmers, so they can improve their livelihoods. The Aymara people are very nice and hospitable, and they will often share their food with you.

In the fallow lands you can sometimes find these cactus with their yellow edible fruits.

La muela del diablo

Last saturday we spent the day in the beautiful nature of the Southern part of La Paz. In this area there are quite a few hikes, but there are no maps and very few guidances in the internet. But we anyways tried to do a hike to a rocky mountain called La muela del diablo (The devil's tooth), due to the form it has. We actually managed to find our way to the place without getting lost or asking too many people. In our way we saw the interesting rabbit-like viscachas, that walk on the vertical cliffs like it wasn't a big deal. From the top of the mountain (almost) we had an awesome view of La Paz. On the way back we decided to try another route and went down through a canyon to Los Pedregales. But as we were going down we could see very dark clouds coming, so we had to run to avoid the rain. In the very last moment we jumped in a mini-bus and didn't get wet. It was important not to get wet, as the same evening we had reserved a table at the fancy restaurant Gustu, but that's another story, for another blog post.

Bolivian Street Art

It was a nice surprise to see so much beautiful street art in Bolivia. Most of their motives are cultural, showing Inca symbols or Aymara people, for example 'cholitas' (Aymara women with traditional clothing), etc. Very interesting. You don't need to go to a museum to see art in Bolivia!

A dog life

Dogs are such an important part of La Paz and Altiplano life, that we couldn't avoid making a blog post about them.

You can find dogs everywhere, in all sizes and even in all races. Expensive dogs like Shar Peis, Huskies, etc. run in the streets without owners. But after a while, we have realised that many of these "street-dogs" actually have owners. They just let them run wherever they like.

Dogs here are also extremely good to cross streets full of fast driving cars. And people are so used to dogs, that you can find dogs sleeping everywhere, some times in places where they can easily be stepped on but somehow they don't. Dogs are well treated here. At least much better than what we have seen in Asia.

Some dogs can be violent and bite random people, like Andrés. Now he has to get 10 injections against rabies and a 5 day treatment with antibiotics. Luckily the government pays all the vaccinations. 

Sometimes we meet dog-gangs as well, especially in El Alto. Once I saw 10 dogs walking together owning the street, they were heading to their "puddle pub" for some drinking and fighting (see the last photo).

Some rasta dogs like to grow dreadlocks and are proud of it.

Dead dogs are lying everywhere, or at least they look like they're dead...probably after a hard night of drinking and fighting.

Dog gangs roam El Alto.

Eduardo Avaroa National Reserve of Andean Fauna

On the third day of our trip in southern Bolivia, we woke up at 4:00am in our room at the most expensive hostal in the area, where our group of 6 had shared a room of 3 beds. Luckily we were three couples. We had ended up at the most expensive hostal because there was no room left anywhere else - apparantly there was an overload of tourists for the Easter holidays and communication between travel agencies, jeep drivers and hostals is non-existent. So no bookings for hostals are ever made on these trips, even though accomodation is included in the package. The jeeps that came later than ours, I have no idea what they did - nights are freezing in the desert and it was far from nearby villages. One jeep broke down the previous day - we don't know what happened to them. The jeeps have no form of communication. We had paid for an adventure, our driver told us.

We had woken up before the sun in order to see it rise through the vapour of some geysers and fumaroles amongst boiling lava pools, in an area called Sol de Mañana at almost 5000m height. Luckily we hadn't eaten eggs for breakfast because the warm vapour smelt of it, rotten eggs, or rather sulfur gases. It was one of the best experiences of the trip. On this early morning drive in these heights, we had frost on our windows both inside and out of the car. Our driver said "no no it's ok!" he could manage by sticking his head out the side window when the sun was shining directly on the frosted window, making it impossible to see anything. He tried wiping it with a cloth but to no use in the cold and with no heating in the car. But then along came Señor Ingeniero Andrés and saved us all by suggesting we use our hand sanitizer (or alcohol gel) to wipe the front window for our driver. And ¡voila! the window was now back to normal driving safety. 

While the sun was still rising we drove to a hot spring where Maria took a dip in the 40ºC warm water. A very relaxing experience. Maria had also missed being in water, so it was very refreshing. 

Later we drove to a green lagoon next to a beautiful volcano in a part of the Atacama Desert. It was very close to the Chilean border, where we dropped off our Brazilian friends, and turned the jeep around toward Uyuni for a 7-hour trip through the national park and desert, in order to catch our 13-hour bus ride back to La Paz at 7:30pm. Along the way to Uyuni we saw vicuñas (a wild type of alpaca), rheas (wild 'ostriches'), domesticated flocks of llamas, and bright-red and orange coloured quinoa fields being harvested. 

Fumaroles in the early morning at Sol de Mañana Geysers, with a sweet smell of sulfur.

Boiling lava.

It was freezing at that time of morning at a height of almost 5000m, except in the water/sulfur vapours which were nice and warm to stand in.

What we thought to be grass balls were at a closer look huge cactus bushes!

Hot spring at the shore of Laguna Salada with 40ºC warm water. 

The flamingos also enjoy the warm water in Laguna Salada.

Laguna Salada.

Close to the Chilean border in the Atacama desert. 

Laguna Verde with a high content of arsenic and cobber which gives it its colour. In the background is the beautiful Lincancabur Volcano.