adventure time

Machu Picchu

“The Best View We Never Saw” 

Okay so this isn’t completely true.  We did see Machu Picchu, just mostly through a constant veil of rain and obscured in thick fog.  

Machu Picchu is as impressive as it looks in pictures, a preserved Incan city atop a great peak.  You’d never expect it to only date back to the 1500s.  There is no written documentation of what is what and who is who, so when our guide told us his guide spiel he clarified that it was one based on speculation.  

You wind up a narrow road in a big bus, passing only greenery.  You arrive at the checkpoint, pay a sole and use the toilet behind a big group of elderly Chinese women, get through the ticket turnstile, and walk the stone path until you come upon the stone city.  You wait for the fog to lift and the rain to stop, but it doesn’t, so you keep your poncho on and accept your damp state.  You see where priests slept with their families, the main market square, the bathing quarters, and where the llamas still graze.  You learn that the best homes for the highest class of people had the best stone construction. You hike to Incan bridges that span intimidating inclines, and to a sun gate that never delivers.  You see the chocolate brown river raging thousands of feet below you and you wonder if the buffet lunch is going to suck.  You try not to fall or twist your ankle and you squeeze past the rainbow of tourists in brightly colored plastic bags to see your sights, to take your shots.  You take the bus at 5:30am and wonder if the sunrise would have been magical had you been able to see it through the fog.  You wonder what it would be like to live so close to the sky and then decide it makes sense that the Incans believed in nature as their god.  

sacred llama friends (and a nice guinea pig)

llama farm & machu picchu.  february, 2012.

Peru is an amazing country—full of history, a mergence of cultures, and very friendly people.  I didn’t meet one Peruvian I didn’t like (okay, except the woman at the airport who made me pay a hefty tax on my personal electronics).  Without knowing many friends or acquaintances who had already visited this alpaca-filled country, we were pleasantly surprised by Peru’s beauty and vibrancy.  The main squares in Lima are stunning—symmetrical and pristine.  They are full of bright yellow buildings, displaying the color of Peru’s flag. Many of them boast elaborate cedar wood balconies unlike anything I have never seen in all my travels.  The churches we have seen, both in Lima and Cusco, are strangely breathtaking.  The blend of Catholic and Incan influences makes for impressive interiors and symbolic curiosities.  All of modern Peru seems to be the result of cultural crossings, the result of a chain of early “globalization” initiatives.  Pizarro brought his cross, disease, and hunger for precious metals and mixed it with the Incan respect for nature, an appetite for guinea pig, and impressive stone masonry. What has resulted is a country of people who are proud of their history but not exactly sure if anyone should be vilified, people who make a living from inviting people to their sacred valley, people who understand that they are growing stronger each year.  

Our sweet abuela of a tour guide takes us to one of Lima’s markets, shows us crazy produce.  

Tonight we listened to a very intense pan flute performance after our bibimbap. Not a combination I’ve ever tried before but it seemed to work strangely well…

Chris and I arrived to Cuzco this morning, tired and still processing the sugar from our pisco sours the night before. Cuzco is home to half a million people. It is full of car smog but also amazing green hills. The altitude here is higher than Machu Picchu so we were advised to not eat or drink too much. We took that advice a little too seriously. We have booked our trip to Peru through a travel agent (something I don’t think we’ll ever do again). Perhaps it was a language barrier or just a general miscommunication but we have been in the dark for what exactly our “tour” consists of since we left Montevideo.

Today when we didn’t eat lunch before our tour, we didn’t think it was a big deal because we thought our Cuzco tour would be 2-3 hours like the previous ones, the Lima City tour and a gastronomic tour. Nope. Today ended up being six hours long including a trip to a very stunning church, a convent, three Incan ruin sites, a baby alpaca handicraft store. It was a lot of information, maybe too much information. With only overpriced plantain chips and corn nuts in our stomachs, by the time the tour ended, we were delirious.

We found a Starbucks, and therefore wifi, to look up where to eat (yes, of course we couldn’t have gone to just any ol’ place). We looked up the address for the Peruvian restaurant that our guide had recommended. One chai latte and a five minute walk later, we sat down at our destination. Feverishly hungry, we realized we were not only the only people in the restaurant but that the food was not the traditional Peruvian cuisine we were craving. Unwilling to compromise, we apologized and quickly left, only to reconsider eating at the adjacent Korean restaurant. We decided we needed to eat or we might start going to a dark place. And that is how we ended up having the best ethnic food we’ve had since being in South America. We happily picked at kimchi with our chopsticks and smiled at all the Koreans who had somehow arrived at the same decision.

we made it.

lima, peru. february ‘12.

last night we had one of the strangest dinners we’ve ever had.  now, i’ve traveled a lot of places and had the potential to run into a lot of strange things, but this was just bizarre.

it involved hippie clown performers juggling flaming torches, walking on sticks, bouncing on pogos, and singing songs from Alanis Morsette and The Cure, next to our table.  it didn’t matter that the “oriental delight” dish that I ordered was just all wrong- when you have a clown staring at you while you are eating, nothing can be right.

Montevideo

 With the day to ourselves, we drove to the capital.  Antique shops, bookstores, indoor Uruguayan shopping malls, and at last a green grocery store.  Montevideo is like Buenos Aires in many ways, but slightly more run down.  The streets are lively, people abound.  There are beautiful run down buildings and ugly run down buildings—vacancies everywhere.  So much appears to be abandoned, perhaps during a time of recession.  On our journey home, we agreed that Montevideo is a strange place.  

We spent the afternoon with our new friend Santiago Garat, chef of Mercado Belcampo here in Jose Ignacio.  He taught us to make empanadas, from start to finish, and I thought I’d pass along what we learned. 
 

Santiago’s Empanadas 

Makes about 4 dozen
Warning: The best way to execute this recipe takes two days.  Prepare dough and filling a day ahead of time.

Ingredients

For dough:
1 kilo flour
400cl hot water 
150-200g lard (pork preferable, vegetarians use canola oil)
20g salt 

For filling:
½ kilo beef diced (or other filling)- Santiago uses rump meat
.675g onions, slivered
garlic
chili flakes
salt
cumin
sugar (if you like)
chopped green onions

Instructions

For dough:

1. Pour ¾ flour in large bowl, push the flour to the outside of the bowl, creating a hole in the middle
2. Dissolve salt in hot water
3. Warm lard until liquid but not hot
4. Mix a little hot water into fat and pour into the middle of the bowl
5. Incorporate flour into the water/fat mixture and keep adding more liquid until fully incorporated  
6. Knead dough on counter top with remaining flour until all the flour is used (dough should not be over worked- stop kneading once flour is fully incorporated
7. Refrigerate overnight

The Filling:

1. Dice meat to your liking
2. Cook onions with fat 
3. Drain the fat from the onions into bowl 
4. Use collected fat to panfry meat
*Traditionally the raw meat for empanadas are blanched before they go in the oven but you can obtain the same results by pan frying the meat
5. Add seasoning: salt, garlic, sugar, chili flakes, and cumin to taste (add green onions to filling the next day to chilled mixture)
*The filling should be nice and juicy but should not have too much liquid 
6. Refrigerate overnight

Making the wrappers:

1.  Take refrigerated dough and roll out onto a floured work surface
2.  Roll dough flat until it is ¼ centimeter thick
3.  Use circle cutter to cut circles, separate with wax paper
4. Refrigerate dough for another 2 hours

To assemble:  
* Filling should be cold when you form empanadas
1. Hold chilled wrapper in hand, place large spoonful of cold filling in center
2. Fold the wrapper in half over the filling and seal by pressing dough together
3. Finish wrapper by either using a fork to make decorative crimp marks or use your hand to make small folds along the edge

To Bake:
1. Preheat oven to 350°F
2. Bake until golden brown, 8-10 minutes

Enjoy!