Peru Food stuff.

 

This is glorious ceviche - raw fish marinated in lime juice. Here it's mostly obscured by the giant sweet potatoes though. I ate this everyday my last 5 days in the country.

Very typical lunch: fried fish, a little salad and potatoes. With an appetizer and a weird corn drink they give you will cost you about 3 bucks.

 

Making ice cream the old fashioned way. The steel pots are in tubs of ice, and they spin them around and add magic or something and ice cream comes out. Look, I'm not a scientist, ok? In Ayacucho.

 

Never got around to trying this one.

 

Chicken stall.

Fish stew, another delicious typical dish. Corn kernels are one of the sides. The waitresses at this restaurant (two sisters) asked me if I liked Peruvian girls, when I said yes, they high-fived one another. That was funny.

Guineau Pigs in the sack. And no, they don't keep them as pets. And yes, I tried it. Tastes like chicken, but really rich and fatty. Also cuter.

Raucana

Lima is surrounded by shanty towns. They climb precariously up the barren hillsides surrounding the city. There was one in particular that I've wanted to visit for a long time - Raucana.

 Raucana was founded in 1981 by communist cadres from Ayacucho, Apurimac, and other People's War heartlands. It was a strategic move to begin building a base of support among the poor workers of Lima with the goal of eventually surrounding the city with a mass of revolutionary people. The site chosen was just 1km South of the national highway - the road on which nearly all of Lima's food comes in on each day.

Right from the beginning, Raucana has been a combative place. It takes its name from a man killed fighting the police in the struggle to found the settlement. During the height of the civil war period, it was a no-go zone for police, defended by armed guard towers, and was the site of frequent pitched street fights on the highway.

Reading about these events in Peru had a big influence on me politically when I was growing up, so naturally I wanted to see the place for myself, even though this is hardly the place that gets written up in guidebooks. No surprise since according to the Lonely Planet, anywhere in Lima outside the main tourist areas are lawless death-traps, which is bullshit, but whatever.

What me and Conor saw when we got there was a bit of a surprise. Today, Raucana seems to be a very poor, but basically functioning neighborhood. There were shops selling basic goods, a couple of restaurants, and kids running around in new clean clothes.



The housing is bad, of course, it's mostly cinder-block construction, currogated metal roofs and other improvised-type works. But there's also a concrete soccer pitch and a recently-built small park.



Unfortunately, a lot of our curiosities would go unanswered. Much as we'd like to start doing interviews asking about the current state of politics and the recent history of the place, it probably wasn't such a good idea without really knowing the score.  So instead we settled on a stroll though Raucana, dodging the odd foraging chicken and daredevil kids on their bikes. We had a quick lunch of fried chicken skin, potatoes, and corn kernels and made our way back to Lima as the sun was setting.

Andean baby, baby alpaca.

Andean baby swag: All baby alpaca everything.

Laguna Churup: A Secret World

The young Dutchman I was hanging out with the night before was apparently a flake, since he had yet to show up on the street corner we agreed to over beers, or maybe he just couldn't hold his liquor. Either way it was fine, since it turns out a nice European couple (she Belgian, he Swiss) would be joining me this morning for the 7am collectivo ride to the trailhead for the Laguna Churup hike.

Two teenage girls (and sheepdog) driving their flock on the trail

I had wrongly assumed that the villages along the way would have some food for sale but I was mistaken. It so happens that my last chance for a real breakfast, the "village" just before the climb - Piteck - is just an abandoned farmhouse beside a dirt road in the valley. So I ended up fueling the whole day on the three bananas I brought and a couple of cookies kindly given to me by the Europeans. It was a hard day too - over 12km distance with 1000 metres of ascending. Trips like this may be why people have remarked that I look so thin in some of these photos. It's true that I lost weight on this trip (now regained) but it was probably only 5lbs tops. I'm just skinny, folks.

The trail ahead looked ominous. We knew we were heading straight into a crack in a massive wall of mountains way above us, and the snow-capped peaks that were our target got more and more shrouded in darkening rain clouds the closer we got. It was something straight out of Mordor.

Up the cliff, through the crack and you're there

The ascending was difficult, this being above 4000m, and involved a tricky section near the end. The only way up was to go over a cliff face beside a cascading stream whose source was the laguna. Luckily there were some steel cables bolted into the rock for the trickier sections, otherwise it would be impossible without specialized equipment.

And sweet goddamn was it worth it! Once we got over that cliff it was like we had entered a secret world. To set the scene: The luminous Laguna Churup, with the glaciated Nevada Churup towering above you. Completely surrounded by mountains, it's so still you can hear a pin drop.