Speaking of Princessa bars, Spencer made the 13-something girl selling them at the bus station in Ica blush. He asked for a Princessa para (for) his Princessa. She liked that. (So did I.) Basically, we bought ice cream bars at every cart we passed—approximately every 50 yards.
Anyway, here's a shot of the local market: tight aisles, strange new fruits.
Like picay (spelling?) (see below). One of the vendors handed us a trial pod and we bought the whole bundle.
To ingest, you crack open the pod, pluck out one of the seeds (which are wrapped in a gauzy white fiber), and suck off the white stuff, spitting the seed out at the end. It's literally like sucking on a cotton ball, but a very sweet, very tasty cotton ball. Natural cotton candy?
A kindred spirit: He couldn't resist the Princessa bar either.
The best meal of the trip, in the local market, cost maybe $1.50 U.S. Can't remember the name of this dish; basically it had rice, potatoes, chunks of meat, a slab of chicken, some delicious sauce. We washed it down with fresh-squeezed maricuya, surely the best fruit in the world. We later found out that eating in the local markets is against mission rules.
From Ica we caught the bus back up north to Paracas, a beach town that survives off tourism to the Islas de Ballestas—also known as the poor man's Galapagos. We arrived at our hotel just in time to catch the sunset off the balcony.
The most defining part of Paracas was meeting new friends, Julio and Julio (Sr. at left, Jr. at right). They run the fair in town, which consists of a few rides and a lot of foosball tables. We gave them a run for their money. Sadly, we also watched their dog die in their arms. A German Shepard mix, it was the fair's guard dog of sorts; someone had fed it broken glass.
The Candelabra . . . a Nasca geoglyph or a tourist hoax? Verdict's still out.
The Islas de Ballestas were stunning. Giant rock outcroppings full of natural arches and frosted with guano—"the droppings of the bat" . . . also the droppings of the hundreds of species of birds found here. Turns out guano is a huge money-maker for Peru. They export the white gold as fertilizer.
Beautiful. Stunning. Also, pungent.
Humboldt penguins. The Humboldt Current runs from the tip of Chile up the coast of Peru, chilling the coastal waters enough for these little guys to flourish at an otherwise uninhabitable latitude. This is the only part of the world you can find these friends, or your local zoo, perhaps.
The Humboldt Current provides an upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water, which means lots of fish and sea life for pelicans and sea lions and millions of birds to chow.
We saw lots of these and heard them bellowing on the one beach—if you can call it that—on the islas. Apparently this is a very important mating beach where thousands of sea lions gather. The video below doesn't do it justice. They are crawling all over each other on this beach, bracing for the next giant wave, which will smash them all into the cliff. There were carcasses of dead baby sea lions on the beach, too. Apparently the males eat the baby males.
Inca Kola and ceviche. It doesn't get more Peruvian than this. Ceviche is raw fish soaked in lemon juice, served with tons of red onion and Peru's fat, quarter-sized corn petals. Inca Kola tastes like carbonated bubble gum.
We made a 16-year-old friend at the foosball tables who was waiting for us when we got off our boat ride to the islas. He'd arranged a game of barefoot soccer for us on this cancha. The police officers, below, were watching; later in the day they caught up with me and called me Maradona. A picture with them was requisite.
1 comment:
i just read every single post on this little blog. to which i say "MORE please."
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