(guest post by Amy)
For Lydia's spring break in April we went on an amazing mother-daughter adventure to Peru. Than and Ethan had taken a trip to Turkey in June 2011, so it was now our turn to explore a new country (and for us a new continent!). We arrived in Lima late in the evening of April 10th and checked into our hotel in the San Isidro neighborhood. After a good night's sleep followed by breakfast and a swim in the hotel pool, Lydia and I walked to the local park, El Olivar (the "Olive Grove") where we tossed around a frisbee (a travel "essential" as far as we are concerned):
We then went back to the hotel to meet the other members of the tour. There were 24 of us, mostly from the US, but there was also a father and teenage son from Australia as well as a young couple from Canada. In addition to Lydia there was one other child, a 9 year old boy traveling with his grandmother. Lydia became fast friends with the grandmother (never mind the 9 year old boy!). Our tour leader was Aquillino (Aqui), who spent his childhood speaking quechua and living in the Andes. In addition to Aqui, the tour company hired local guides at each destination, so we got a lot of great information everywhere we went. Our first stop in Lima was to Casa Diez Canseco, a private home with a beautiful garden where we were given a tour and our first taste of pisco sour drinks (yum!). Here we are in front of the pool at the Casa:
We had lunch which including fried yucca (very starchy), pumpkin soup, meat with potatoes and crepes with strawberries. After lunch we waddled back to the bus to visit Lima's UNESCO world heritage historic center. We saw the catacombs of the San Francisco Monastery and toured the Lima Cathedral, which contains the tomb of Francisco Pizzaro, conqueror of the Inca empire and quintessential "Judas" due to his treament of the Inca Atahualpa. My favorite part of the day was the visit to the Larco Museum, a private museum with the most amazing collection of pre-Columbian artifacts. Here is a photo of a quipo (Incan accounting apparatus) that Lydia took at the museum:
The Larco even has a separate building just to house its collection of erotic pre-Columbian artifacts -- not something you'd find in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (sorry, no photos of those artifacts!). After the long day of touring we ate a quick dinner at a local restaurant near the hotel and went to bed early in preparation for our 8am flight to Cusco.
Lydia took some great photos of the Andes as we flew from Lima to Cusco. Here is a sample of what she saw out her plane window:
Because Cusco's elevation is around 11,000 feet, we stayed in the Sacred Valley (8500 feet) for 3 nights to acclimate before staying in Cusco. En route to our hotel in the Sacred Valley we stopped at a breeding center for llamas and alpacas. Lydia fed alfalfa to one of the animals.
We learned about Peruvian weaving techniques and also saw our first Peruvian potatoes. The white ones in the foreground are freeze dried:
On the trip we were served lots and lots of potatoes - they came in various shapes, colors and sizes. Lydia likes them, thankfully! After the llama farm we had lunch at the Wayra Ranch. More pisco sours! Plus lots of other Peruvian dishes including alpaca meat. They entertained us with a horse and dancing show - touristy but fun anyway. After lunch we got to visit a local ceramicist's studio (Pablo Seminario) and tried our hand at creating our own pottery tiles, which were fired and then delivered to us a couple of days later at our hotel in Cusco - a nice souvenir.
Our next stop involved a visit to a local tavern where we learned how to make the the Peruvian drink called chicha, a beer made from corn - tasted very sour to me - bleck. In the room next to the tavern the owner keeps guinea pigs. Guinea pig is a delicacy in Peru so it is apparently quite common for homes to have a guinea pig room:
I saw several ladies on the side of the road selling roast guinea pig. Here is a photo I snapped from the bus window:
Some more street scenes from the Urumbura valley. The 3-wheeled "tuk-tuk" is a common mode of transportation.
We arrived at our wonderful hotel (the Aranwa resort) in late afternoon. I think Lydia is now basically spoiled for life - our room was huge, with a walk in shower, balcony, heated towel rack, and chocolates on our pillow each night. Lydia and I threw on our swimsuits and spent an hour relaxing in the hot tub before dinner. It was a bit too cold for swimming in the pool from my perspective, but the hot tub felt very nice after our long day of touring. Dinner was "Make Your Own Pizza" night, which turned out to be a weird event with not so good pizza, but we got to know our fellow travelers better and listened to our first Peruvian panpipes, so it was an enjoyable evening.
The next day was one of the highlights of the trip: Machu Picchu! It was also conveniently on my birthday -- what a great way to celebrate. I had been reading the Mark Adams book "Turn Right at Machu Picchu" on the airplane to Peru, which was a fun read in preparation for visiting the site. The train ride to Machu Picchu was very touristy but we could see the Inca trail from the train window and lots of beautiful scenery.
Here are some photos of the amazing Inca walls and the sun temple:
We had a little bit of rain at Machu Picchu - the only rain we had the whole trip. After making our way back down from Machu Picchu, we had a delicious meal in town (fish with vegetables and flan for dessert), and then shopped for souvenirs in the market near the train station while we waited to board the train back to Ollantaytambo. Lydia had a surprise arranged for me back at the hotel: at dinner the tour guides arranged for a piece of birthday cake with a candle to be delivered to our table and Peruvian panpipes played Happy Birthday. Lydia had arranged this with the tour guide after breakfast - very sneaky!
The next day we had a fun time rafting the Urumbura river with a handful of others from our tour group (some others in the group went horseback riding or ziplining). The river is a class II-III river and there were enough white water rapids to keep it interesting, even for Lydia. The woman sitting next to Lydia in the raft actually fell in the river at the last set of rapids, but she was quickly rescued.
After the rafting, Lydia and I tossed around the frisbee with our river guide while we waited for our clothes to dry --even though we wore wetsuits we got soaked! Back at the hotel we had a Pachamanca feast for lunch. This involves cooking meat (beef, chicken, lamb and alpaca), potatoes and fava beans on hot rocks underground. Here is the meal as it is being unearthed:
Following the feast we observed a local "shaman" demonstrate the Inca's "payment to the earth" ceremony, which involved coca leaves and various other offerings (including cookies and jimmies!) made to pachamama or mother earth. Lydia and I both enjoyed drinking the coca leaf tea that we were served at all the hotels in Peru. I do not understand why the tea is banned in the US. Here Lydia is holding coca leaves that were part of the offering made to pachamama:
To round out another busy day we drove to a different hotel after sunset to stargaze with a local expert. The sky was clear and the stars were incredibly bright. At the hotel's observatory we saw Jupiter through the telescope as well as the Orion Nebula - a wonderful experience.
The following day we started our drive back to Cusco. The scenery along the way was beautiful:
We made a couple of stops on the way. The first was to visit the salt pans of Maras. They have been in operation for hundreds of years and produce all kinds of salt: medicinal salt, pink salt, fleur de sel, bath salts.
We then saddled up on a donkey for a ride through the village of Maras - that was not my favorite moment of the trip, but it was an interesting (!) experience. Lydia seemed to enjoy the ride:
The best part of the day for me was visiting a local home to learn how to make quinoa soup. The cook in the white apron, Carmen, demonstrated her recipe.
As a special "treat", Carmen also offered us roast guinea pig. I did not partake, but Lydia tried it! I took one look at the little feet and just couldn't...
Our final stop of the day was a visit to an important archeological site called Sacsayhuaman, which has the most enormous Inca walls. It is hard to understand how the Incas were able to move the stones into position:
We arrived in Cusco around 4:30pm. Cusco is a very attractive city, nestled in the mountains, with lots of plazas and small parks dotted around the center. Our hotel was well located, about 2 blocks from the main square, the Plaza de Armas. Here we are at the Plaza de Armas:
After fortifying ourselves with coca tea we decided to do a little souvenir shopping, then we stopped at a tapas restaurant for dinner. It was very tasty (and nice to take a break for a meal on our own, away from the tour group). The dessert I had was a wonderful chocolate mousse sprinkled with salt from Maras. Lydia had baked apple with cinnamon ice cream. Delicious!
The next day we toured several sites in Cusco: the central cathedral, the Temple of the Sun, and a weaving center. Here is the Temple of the Sun:
The cathedral has an interesting collection of art, including a painting of the Last Supper featuring - what else - roast guinea pig. We joined a couple of members of our group for lunch at a local pizza place (Lydia ordered chorizo pizza, which she said was delicious), then did some more souvenir shopping, finding t-shirts for Than and Ethan. Before dinner we all gathered for pisco sours and we learned how to play the panpipes. Our teacher was an American woman who had lived in Cusco for many years, together with 2 Peruvian experts. After demonstrating how to play the instrument (both the "ira" and the "arka"), they handed out panpipes to all of us and taught us how to play 2 songs. It may have been the effects of the pisco sours but I thought we sounded pretty good! Dinner was a feast at a local restaurant, complete with traditional dancing and music.
I was sorry to leave Cusco early the next morning. I would love to spend more time there someday. We had an early morning flight back to Lima, then a long bus ride to the desert city of Ica. We began to see sand dunes shortly after we left Lima. They were dotted with chicken farms as well as fields of avocados, asparagus, corn, and even tomatoes. It was amazing to me that they are able to grow so much in the desert (irrigated by river water from the Andes). We stopped at a regional museum to see the pottery from the area and also lean about mummies and the sacred burial process. This museum also had a collection of sculls showing evidence of trepanation - somewhat creepy.
The main goal of the trip to Ica was to see the Nazca Lines, a series of ancient geoglyphs made in the ground by removing the top layer of red soil/pebble and exposing the whitish ground underneath. The pictures range from hummingbirds to monkeys to a figure called the "astronaut". The only way to see the Nazca Lines is to get into a tiny airplane (a 6-seater), fly for 1.5 hours while careening around in figure eights to take photos. Needless to say, that did not appeal to me (having been in small aircraft before on our honeymoon to Nantucket and while we were in Tanzania), so I opted out of seeing the Nazca Lines. Lydia was game, of course, so she went up with another family from our tour and took some photos. Here is the monkey and the hummingbird:
In between visits to the airport to drop off and pick up our Nazca line passengers, we visited a chocolate factory (more my speed!) where they were making chocolates with the pecans grown in the area. We learned that Peru grows lots of nuts - the only kind it does not grow are hazelnuts. Later in the afternoon the adults in the tour visited a local pisco winery, while the kids (and kids at heart) stayed at our hotel to swim in the amazing pool. Here is Lydia going down the water slide at the pool:
The highlight of the day for me was at sunset when we got to ride on dune buggies over the sand dunes and then go sand boarding down the slopes. The dune buggy ride was similar to being on a roller coaster - a bit of a white knuckle moment for me - but the sand boarding was just like sledding, without the cold wet snow. Here are some photos:
On our last day of the tour we drove from Ica back to Lima, stopping to visit the Ballestras Islands, a collection of small islands inhabited by thousands of sea lions, humboldt penguins, blue footed boobies and other birds. Lydia called this the "guano tour" as the smell of the guano was at times overwhelming, but we did get to see some fantastic wildlife:
We returned to Lima in the late afternoon and enjoyed some time at the hotel pool before setting off to a neighborhood restaurant for dinner. Some members of the tour had late night departures back to the US. Our plane did not leave until late in the evening of the following day, so I arranged for us to take a cooking class in Lima, preceded by a tour of a local food market since we had not yet had a chance to visit one. We saw lots of fruits and vegetables, enormous avocados and pecans, and some other interesting sites, including this street vendor selling quail eggs which are a popular snack in Lima:
Some photos taken by Lydia
of the produce we saw:
Our cooking class ("Sky Kitchen") was held on the top floor of an apartment building in the Milaflores neighborhood. First we sampled 15 different fruits that we had picked out at the market, then we prepared 3 dishes: stuffed avocados, Papas a la Huancaina (potatoes in a spicy cream sauce) and Aji de Gallina ( chicken in a yellow pepper sauce). It was a fun way to end our trip to Peru. Here are photos of the class and the potato dish we made:
We got on our plane later that night and flew on the red eye back to Boston. It was great to see Than at the airport the next morning!
