If you look at any travel book on Peru, they all make the (logical) assumption that you’re going to fly into Lima or one of the other southern cities and work your way outward from there. There’s a reason for that. Coming into Peru from the north does not make a good impression.
There are three border crossings from Ecuador: one along the coast road, one through the mountains, and one in the jungle. The experts all agree that the mountain crossing at La Tina (near the Ecuadorean village of Macara) is the best option, and the Loja Internacional bus company runs a border-crossing route to the city of Piura. Our intended destination was the Andean town of Chachapoyas, but since there’s no straight way to get there we had to spend a night in Piura, catch a morning bus to the coastal city of Chiclayo, then take an eleven-hour overnight to our final destination.
To call the cities of the north Peruvian desert unlovely is being generous. Deserts can be beautiful places, but not when there’s trash strewn everywhere. Blogger Jessica Groenendijk talks about this in detail in an article for Living in Peru. Basically, the closer you get to human habitation the more garbage you see strewn along the road, piled into empty lots, and mounded between buildings.
I’m talking whole trash bags left out to rot and be ripped open by the thousands of wild dogs roaming the area. When walking anywhere, you have to watch every step in order to avoid piles of trash and dog excrement. There’s no green space in these cities; everything is concrete, asphalt, and dirt, so there’s nowhere else for the dogs to go. Lea and I were only in the area for a few short days, but that was enough to put the northern Peruvian wastelands right up there between Texas and Tanzania on the list of places I never want to go again.
But enough about that. On to Chachapoyas!
Chachapoyas is an Andean town of about 20,000 people just on the Amazonian side of the mountains. It’s a launch point for excursions to many natural and archaeological sites, such as Kuélap (the other Machu Picchu). Kuélap was a mountain-top city built by the Chachapoyas, one of many civilizations who were swallowed by the Incas in the decades before the Spanish conquest. Until a few years ago, Kuélap was only accessible via a two-day hike up a pretty steep ravine. Now there’s an over-mountain cable car that will safely deposit you at a tourist landing 2km from the site, from which you can hike the rest of the way in.
And see, here’s where tourist attractions in Peru differ from those in the U.S. and, honestly, many other countries we’ve visited. In the U.S., you can drive right up to the Grand Canyon, get out, and look. A few years ago, Lea and I drove all over Mt. Rainier, stopping for photos wherever we wanted, and hiking a few side-trails whenever the mood hit us. In Peru, though, you’ll bounce over miles of twisty, single-lane dirt roads until you finally have to stop, get out, and hike two to six kilometers (or more in some cases) to see whatever it is you came for.
And are the trails level? No siree, Bob. What’s the point of a mountain landscape if you don’t have to climb up and down and up and down for hours on end to appreciate it? Some of the sites have horses you can hire to ride part of the way, but that means the rest of us get to watch out for piles of horse crap instead of enjoying the scenic vistas.
Sigh.
Yes, I know Peruvians are acclimated to these kind of hikes and think nothing of it. I also know that all the cool stuff in the Andes is really inaccessible and that the country has done its best to open these sites up for the public to enjoy. But the fact that these sites are so inaccessible just proves that Andean cultures were bugnutz insane to begin with.
Hey, should we build our settlement in this nice, fertile river valley? No, let’s erect a giant city on the highest mountain we can find. If I understood our guide correctly, all of Kuélap’s water had to be carried up from the areas below. Well guess what, homeys? Your impregnable walled mountain city ain’t as defensible as you think if all I have to do is cut off your water supply and wait for your defenders to die of thirst.
Anyhow, the walk up to Kuélap wasn’t as bad as I’m making out, despite the altitude. The way down was scarier, what with the afternoon rain making the stepping stones slick with mud. The next day we rode even further out of town to see the Revash mausoleums (a much more difficult trek on foot from the visitors’ station) and the Leymebamba museum of Chachapoyas culture, featuring artifacts recovered from the burial sites at Revash and Laguna de los Condores, mock-ups of local sarcophagi, and a collection of actual mummies. I’ll say this for the Chachapoyas – they were masters of space-saving dead body storage techniques.
Back in the town of Chachapoyas, we met up with an awesome guy named Leo who teaches business administration and English at the local university. Leo took us out for shots – Amazonian shots. We went to a bar called Licores la Reina where Leo ordered a sampler of twelve regional liquors which we had to sip and decide which we liked best. Most were derived from fruits available in the Amazon, but I actually liked the Leche and Cafe based liquors (much to my surprise). Lea and Leo settled on one called “Seven Roots” and ordered a small pitcher. I did not partake; that one was too woody for my tastes.
Speaking of tastes…
Eating on the Road
Oh my god, we need vegetables. After nearly two months in South America, Lea and I have been dying for vegetables, as well as anything that doesn’t fall under the heading of “typical local cuisine.” The food here isn’t completely lacking in variety, but it does suffer somewhat from what I call the “Morocco Problem.”
We spent two weeks in Morocco in 2015. Ever since, any time someone has suggested going out for Moroccan, we decline. Moroccan food has no variety whatsoever. Your choices are kabobs or tajine (a kind of stew). Your meat selections are chicken and kefta (minced beef or lamb), and sometimes only kefta. I don’t need to draw a chart to show how limiting that is, and how you might get sick of it after two weeks of nothing but. “Did these people learn nothing from the French?” I still ask when I think about that trip. Apparently they did not.
Anyway, Ecuadorean and Peruvian tipicos is like this: Your meal starts with soup, usually chicken or rice in chicken broth, often with bits of potato for good measure. Your main course is a pile of rice with a small cut of meat (chicken, flank steak, pork, guinea pig), more potatoes (often French fries), and a “salad” that is either a spoonful of coleslaw or perhaps a few slices of cucumber in vinegar.
We cook for ourselves when we can, but finding hostels with kitchens and refrigerators has been tricky. Finding something we can make into a meal is problematic as well. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, “Grocery stores in South America are like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.” In the markets there are plenty of fruits available (which the Ecuadoreans are heavily into juicing) but the vegetable selections are sparse.
We’ve often settled for jelly and butter sandwiches, or sprung for small packages of cheese and sandwich meat that we can use all at once and not have to refrigerate. The same for milk and cereal – it’s a nice break from the “bread roll with tea” breakfast that seems to be standard, so in Chachapoyas we improvised refrigeration by setting our milk carton in the bathroom window and leaving it open to the 50⁰ night air.
Our first cooking adventure was in the Galapagos. Our second hostel had a kitchen, albeit short on plates, bowls, pans, and utensils. The grocery stores were short on… a lot, actually. They had plenty of pasta, but nothing obvious in the way of sauce to go with it, not to mention usable cuts of meat. Sure, you can buy a whole dead chicken or half a cow or pig, but packaged cuts like you’d find in the U.S. aren’t really a thing.
On our first night we settled for noodles and butter, but the next time we improvised pasta primavera. Essentially, we bought any vegetable that looked good and used a packet of cream of asparagus soup for the sauce. I’m not sure what we ended up with, but it tasted good.
So far our cooking, when we can do it, has featured pasta heavily. When we see ingredients we might like in something, whether we’re going to use them soon or not, we grab them because we never know if we’ll see them again. This weekend we hit the jackpot when we came across peanut butter, packets of green curry, and a jar of cayenne. For protein, we’ve kept to tuna and eggs as they’re the easiest to deal with. We’ve gone vegetarian for a lot of our self-cooked meals because if we don’t serve ourselves veggies no one else will.
That is, until we crossed the “Chinese Restaurant Line.”
The point came when we just had to have something besides tipicos, bread for breakfast, and street food. We sprung for Domino’s near the end of our stay in Quito. We found a really good Lebanese restaurant hidden away in Puerto López. We ate Cuban in Guayaquil and lavished our praise on the owner. Once we got to Loja, though, Chinese restaurants started springing from the earth like toadstools.
To be clear, we’ve yet to see an actual Chinese person in any of these restaurants, and the food is even further from authentic Chinese cuisine than what you find in an Alabama Chinese buffet. Nevertheless, they serve vegetables. More vegetables than we’d seen in ages. We ate Chinese three nights in a row in Loja, and a Chinese restaurant was our first stop when we reached our current city of Trujillo. (More on Trujillo next week.)
Our hostess in Chachapoyas let us use her kitchen, so we concocted something like tuna casserole one night and pasta with vegetables and a mustardy pepper sauce the next. In Trujillo we have our own kitchen (albeit with what amounts to an electric camping stove) and we’ve had noodles with stir fry and soy sauce for three meals in a row. The last was extra good because of that cayenne I mentioned.
Yes, enjoying local cuisine is a vital part of travel and immersing in another culture. Sometimes, though, you just need a break. A long break. And a kitchen. And a bottle of hot sauce.
