Category: Peru

It’s official: Machu Picchu is the most beautiful tourist trap in the world. Make no mistake, Machu Picchu and its surrounding landscapes are breathtaking. So is the cost of getting there, staying in a hotel, and eating a meal. Here’s an example: Anywhere else in Peru, $12 will get you an eight-hour bus ride from one city to another. In Machu Picchu, $12 is what it costs to ride the bus up the mountain to the site, and another $12 is what it costs to ride back down.

Supply and demand, baby. You’re a captive audience and everyone knows it. The process to get entry tickets and train reservations is so bureaucratic and byzantine that I’m going to have to write a whole post just to give people instructions on how to do it.

In the dark, ignorant days of the 20^th Century, we were taught that the Middle East’s “fertile crescent” was the Cradle of Civilization. The truth is that there were at least five cradles where civilization emerged on its own without any prompting from outside influence. One of these was the Peruvian Andes, which is why you can’t fall down a flight of stairs in this country without landing on some archaeological remnant of a bygone era.

The upside of that is that if you’re interested in history, then wherever you go in Peru there’s something unique to see. The downside is that is that you feel pressured to visit historical site after historical site as you travel around the country. I mean, how do you choose which ancient civilization to skip? Because there’s so much history to see in Peru (and little else that doesn’t involve adventure sports) we’ve kind of rushed our way through the country. We budgeted six weeks for Peru, but instead we’ve sped through it in four.

I’ve covered our visits to several of the big tourist sites in previous articles. Once we hit the Cusco area, though, we were suddenly in the Inca heartland, a.k.a. Tourist Central. Those of us brought up in the American education system probably think of the Incas as the dominant civilization of South America, but in fact they were merely the short-lived final stage of pre-Columbian Andean culture before the Spanish arrived. The Inca Empire only lasted for about a century. They conquered all the other Andean peoples, imposed their own culture on top of the others, then the Spanish appeared and convinced some of the Inca’s subjects to rise up and… you know the rest.

Cusco was the Inca capitol, and it looks like the Spanish bulldozed the city and replaced it with a little bit of home. There are colonial Spanish churches, monasteries, and architecture everywhere. Unlike other cities in Peru, the roofs of the houses are pitched, not flat, and covered in terracotta tile, giving Cusco a distinctly European flavor. It’s only when you wander down the streets of souvenir shops leading to the central plaza and look at the stonework that you notice the bones of the old Inca city on which modern Cusco was built.

Inca stonemasons built walls by fitting stones together so perfectly that no mortar was needed. They didn’t square them; they just polished them somehow (it’s still up to debate) so that their walls were seamless. They saying is that the stones fit so perfectly that you can’t slip a dollar bill between them.

The stonework in Machu Picchu isn’t as amazing as in Cusco except for the fact that it’s at the top of a damn mountain. This site was never discovered by the Spanish and was unknown to Americans and Europeans until its “scientific discovery” by Hiram Bingham in 1911. (The locals knew about it, of course, and there’s evidence that it may have been stumbled upon by German explorers as early as 1867.) The site has been cleared of vegetation and is now open to thousands upon thousands of tourists every day.

My advice: get there early and get through quick. The buses start up the mountain at 6:30 and do not stop. Floods of people will arrive behind you, and apparently the main reason they’re there is to take selfies. If you’re interested in seeing the site itself, you’ll constantly be craning you neck over one tour group or another, or some teenager doing fashion poses for her boyfriend, or a mass of senior citizens with their walking canes and selfie sticks. I kid you not – there was one group of elderly tourists following us around who for some reason were dressed just like Alex and his droogs from A Clockwork Orange.

Our final stop in Peru was the city of Puno on the shore of Lake Titicaca. Puno is at the highest elevation we’re going to be on our trip through South America (unless we get to see the Flying Cholitas on the outskirts of La Paz) and we’ve had a hard time breathing given the lack of oxygen. We didn’t go see any ruins, but we did ride out to the floating islands of the Uros people who live on the lake.

The Uros are a very old culture who now live mainly off the tourists who visit their islands. The islands, made from reeds and mud, float on the surface of the lake and each houses four to five families. There were 87 islands in the community we visited. Some were mainly residential while others were geared for the tourist trade with reed hotels, restaurants, and souvenir shops. The Uros aren’t entirely without modern conveniences – the first island we visited had solar cells to run electricity to the huts.

Peru has been both beautiful and taxing. It’s too modern to think of as a “developing country” but in many ways it seems to be lagging. We’ve stayed places with wide-screen televisions in every room, but no heating and unreliable water. We’ve gone to big-box stores cloned from (and cleaner than) any American Wal-Mart, but you can’t find a pair of sunglasses or more than one size of Band-Aid to save your life. And don’t get me started on the lack of garbage cans.

Next stop, Copacabana (Bolivia, not the one from the Barry Manilow song). Pretty soon there will be salt flats, the Island of the Sun, and Flying Cholitas.

Things I Forgot to Mention

Parades Everywhere!

Waaay back in Chiclayo I mentioned that one of the things we saw in our mere eight hours there was a random street parade. At the time, we thought it a lucky happenstance. Then there was a 6:00 a.m. procession in Chachapoyas, two days of parades near the university in Trujillo, a parade in the Callao district of Lima, a Festival of the Saints parade in Cusco, and nighttime and daytime parades in Puno, including one to celebrate the anniversary the city’s hospital. Apparently Peruvians will throw a parade at the drop of a hat. Our hostel in Puno was so close to the goings-on that it was like booking a room in the French Quarter without realizing it was Mardi Gras.

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Not Just Any Old Last Supper

In both the Convento de San Francisco in Lima and the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption of the Virgin in Cusco, there are paintings of the Last Supper. These aren’t copies of the Da Vinci Last Supper. The one in Lima is, shall we say, crowded. Apparently Jesus and his Disciples had quite a large wait staff for the event and the meal included South American staples such as chili peppers. In Cusco, the main dish served at the Last Supper was roasted guinea pig. We weren’t allowed to take photos and the painting in Cusco was policed rather heavily, so I’m just going to post these pictures I stole off the Internet and a video from John Cleese and Eric Idle that puts things into perspective.

My Recommended Read for Peru

One thing I’m doing is reading a novel by an author from each country we visit. I completely forgot to update you guys on my book for Peru: Death in the Andes by Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa. It’s the story of a Peruvian policeman investigating a series of disappearances in a remote village of the Andes, during the height of the communist terrorist organization Shining Path’s reign of terror. It has the structure of a murder mystery with the tension of a horror novel. Read my full review here.

That’s All, Folks!

For those interested, here is the map of our trip through Peru and a picture of Lea with a llama. The next time you hear from me, I’ll be checking in from La Paz.

When doing research for this trip, Lea found a long-term travel course on the website BootsnAll which suggested that instead of planning a rigid itinerary, one should pick “pillars” for the trip – stops along the way that you know you’re going to hit no matter what. If we were going to Peru then the biggest pillar for me, perhaps even more so than Machu Picchu, was going to see the Nazca Lines.

The Nazca Lines fascinated me all the way back to my school days in the 70s, when UFOlogy and pseudoarchaeology were going through a revival. Even then I never bought the “runways for flying saucers” theory, but the lines were there in the desert, laid out so that they can only be seen from above, by a people without the technology to view their own works of art.

So imagine my surprise when, on the day Lea and I were trekking to the Nazca airport in order to catch a flight and see the lines with our own eyes, I wasn’t even a little excited about it. When I realized this, it bothered me a great deal. What was wrong with me? This was one of the things I’d most wanted to see on this trip. Why was I in such a funk?

Lea pointed out the obvious: we’ve been doing some hard, hard traveling ever since we left Loja. The distances are longer, the cities are more confusing. The learning curve for Peru is steep, and it seems to reset itself with each new city we visit. We’d just followed up a seven-hour bus ride and late night arrival by getting lost trying to find the place we were staying. I’d had food poisoning once already (and little did I know would get it again later that very day).

But thank Apu and the other gods of the Peruvian desert, all my dreariness fell away once I climbed into an eight-seat “flying ceiling fan” of an airplane, took off, and saw the outline of a giant whale sketched in the desert, crisscrossed with perfect geometric lines that had been there for two thousand years.

(Side Note: After viewing the Lines, you should attend the planetarium show at Nazca’s DM Hotel. The cost is S/.20 per person, with shows in French, English, and Spanish. It goes in depth about the possible astronomical significance of the Lines as well as their relationship to nearby sources of water. It also talks about Maria Reiche, the German scientist who devoted her life to studying and preserving the Lines, and who once lived at the hotel that now houses the planetarium. If the sky is clear, the planetarium operator will point out the southern constellations and show different celestial objects through a telescope.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When I left off last week we were still in Lima, though we had moved from the slightly shady port district of Callao to the Centro Historico. This gave us time to wander around the Plaza San Martin, the Plaza de Armas, the Basílica de San Francisco (with museum and catacombs), watch the changing of the guard at the presidential palace, visit the excellent Museum of Peruvian Art, and eat a bucket of Norky’s Fried Chicken.

We also went to Lima’s Chinatown, which had plenty of Chinese shops, iconography, restaurants, and not a single Chinese person that we could identify.

After a week in one place, the longest we’d stayed anywhere since Quito, it was time to move on. We took the afternoon bus to Nazca and took a chance on our accommodations. So far, aside from the two-week homestay that was part of our Spanish class in Quito and our one night at a posh resort in Papallacta, we’d made nearly all of our reservations at various backpackers’ hostels through Booking.com.

We’ve also been using the website Couchsurfing.com to meet people in various cities, just so we could have human conversations that aren’t business transactions. The results have been hit-or-miss: we’ve met some fantastic people who we’d love to stay in touch with and see again, but we’ve been stood up completely twice so far. The main deal with Couchsurfing, though, is that it lets you connect with people who will let you stay in their homes. We hadn’t bit that bullet yet, and one strange guy we met in Trujillo nearly scared us away from the idea. In Nazca we went for it, and we’re glad that we did.

Our host was Hendrie. (Hi, Hendrie!) Hendrie was awesome. He put us up in his house, told us where to get the best seafood in town, haggled with a tour operator to get us a deal on an adventure excursion, and even walked us to the bus station when it was finally time for us to leave. Remember when I said that the learning curve in Peru is steep? If you can get in touch with a guy as generous as Hendrie, everything becomes so much simpler. Experiences like this are why Lea and I plan to host travelers ourselves once we get back to the States.

Now about that adventure tour…

There are several archaeological sites around Nazca in addition to the Lines. We didn’t want to miss out, and a tour would hit several of them at once. Hendrie told us that the tours leave at 2:00 p.m. and if you get there a half hour before you can usually get a discount as they try to fill empty seats. We got one that was going to visit four locations, but we didn’t fully understand at the time what we were signing up for.

We went with a large group of Tahitians in taxis to the edge of town, where two dune buggies were waiting for us. (Say what?) The dune buggies took us off-road on bumpy trails to visit the Nazca aqueducts, an ancient burial site that had been looted by grave robbers (leaving the bones to bake in the sun), and the pyramid complex at Cahuachi.

Then our drivers took us out into the dunes. “So the dunes are the fourth location?” we wondered. “They’re certainly pretty. I wish they would stop so we could take some pictures.”

That wasn’t the plan. The drivers did stop, but only to let some air out of the tires for better traction. We climbed to a high ridge with our buggy looking out over a pretty damn steep abyss of sand. Lea and I realized what was about to happen when we saw the other dune buggy zip down the cliff.

“No. No no no. No no no no no….”

The other passengers let out a roller coaster scream as our buggy shot over the edge, down the valley, and up the other side. And again. And again. And again. After the third plummet I stopped shouting “No” and just accepted the fact that our buggy was going to roll and we were all going to die.

So here I am, reincarnated as a llama, typing my final blog entry before the farmer comes to shear my wool.

Well, it might have ended that way. Llamas don’t do stupid things like sign up for dune buggy excursions without realizing that if they stick you in a dune buggy it’s for one reason only. As it is, we survived (though our two buggies spent a bit of time helping a third get unstuck from the sand). By the time we headed back for Nazca the sun had set and we barreled along bumpy off-road roads with only the vaguest bit of faith that our driver knew where he was going.

We got back to town in plenty of time to pick up our luggage, say goodbye to Hendrie, eat a dinner of cow’s tongue spaghetti from a street vendor, and get on a fourteen-hour night bus for Cuzco.

With a pound of sand still in our hair, eyes, ears, and teeth.

It’s been two months since we left on our voyage. Back then, I put up a snarky post in answer to the people who thought we’d lost our minds. Recently though, I’ve had doubts about my ability to hang in there and see the journey through. The last thing I want to do is quit, go back to the U.S., and get a soul-crushing job. On the other hand I have to ask if I’m still enjoying the experience or if I’m sticking it out for the sake of stubbornness.

The thing is, there’s so much left I want to do. Machu Picchu is so close (relativey speaking). I want to see the Bolivian salt flats and the stars from the Atacama Desert. I want to swim in a pool big enough to see from orbit. I want to spend the longest day of the year in Tierra del Fuego. I want to bask on the beach in Uruguay. And I want to write stories, novels, and finish this blog, dammit.

The problem may be that Ecuador was easy from a travel standpoint. Peru, on the other hand, is hard. You wouldn’t think there’d be this much culture shock crossing a simple border – not like walking from Israel to Jordan and back last year, for instance. But I’m telling you, Peru just makes everything difficult.

Por ejemplo, Quito was nice enough to upload their metropolitan bus routes into Google. Lima, whose routes are much more confusing, did not. Everywhere else, the buses have their major stops printed in the front window so you can tell where they’re going as they approach. In Lima, the destinations are printed on the side, so you can’t tell if it’s the right bus to flag down until it’s already passed you by.

And it’s the little things, like the lack of hot running water (probably true everywhere in S.A.) that makes it impossible to really clean pots, plates, and silverware. It’s the fact that we booked an apartment with a kitchen that it turns out has no pots, and no bowls, and a single skillet so small you can only fry one egg at a time. It’s the fact that getting around has become a logistical nightmare.

Lima is a labyrinth with streets that weave and split and merge in horrific traffic scrums. Our home town of Atlanta recently made a list of top ten cities with the worst traffic in the world. I can only assume Lima wasn’t counted because the analysts they sent here are still stuck in gridlock.

One point in Lima’s favor: So far all the places we’ve visited have been overrun with dogs. Lima is full of cats.

I’m typing this from a fourth-floor studio apartment near the historic city center. Someone somewhere in the building has been playing (and badly singing along to) the exact same song over and over again for hours. We spent the last four nights in a very nice hostel in a sketchy part of town, but we haven’t had a chance to explore the museums, cathedrals, and other historic sites. Plus, we need a week off from long-haul bus trips.

We came here from Trujillo, a much more sane (in my mind) city that wasn’t too hard to navigate. Trujillo sits right between the ancient capital cities of the Chimu and Moche cultures, each of which is entirely different from the other, and both are very different from the civilizations up in the Andes. The diversity in art and architecture styles is astounding.

Truth be told though, Lea and I are getting ruined-out. Archaeology is one of the main draws for Peru, to be sure, but we’ve been visiting archaeological sites and museums several times a week for a month, and the ceramics are bleeding into each other at this point. We’ve made reservations for Machu Picchu – a logistical nightmare in itself – but after that we may have to put a moratorium on visiting anything not built in the last hundred years. After all, South America’s got to have something else to offer, right?

Actually, yes.

(Side note to email subscribers: click here to watch the video.)

That is the Peruvian Paso, a horse breed known for its smooth ride and silly walk. The horse show in Trujillo is not to be missed if you’re down there. The program is normally in Spanish, but we happened to crash the party on a day that a Holland America cruise ship booked the event for its English-speaking passengers. We got to enjoy the show, but las turistas from the cruise ship were treated to empanadas and pisco sours. (emoji angry face)

In Lima we’ve spent four days learning how to get around the city, how vitally important it is to ask the bus conductor whether it goes to the stop you need even if it’s listed on the bus itself, and to just accept that you’ll probably have to walk five blocks at the end of your ride in any case. We went all the way out to La Punta, the tip of Lima’s harbor that juts out into the Pacific, in search of an excursion company – to no avail; one was closed and the other’s office wasn’t open to the public. On another day we went all the way to Miraflores (the part of Lima where the rich people live) to buy our train tickets to Machu Picchu – to no avail; the office only accepted credit cards, which we prefer not to carry.

Each of those trips took far, far longer than any bus ride should. The trip from Callao to Miraflores was an hour and a half each way. On the way back, we discovered that Lima must be South America’s Las Vegas from the sheer number of cheesy casinos we passed. All was not lost, though. We were able to sort out the Machu Picchu reservations online (though we still need to find somewhere to print our tickets) and after twelve back-and-forth emails with the excursion company we were able to set sail for Palomino Island to swim with the sea lions!

Isla Palomino is a small rock off the coast that is home to a large sea lion colony. It’s an hour and a half by boat from Lima’s harbor, around the large Isla San Lorenzo and the smaller El Frontón with its spectacular swarms of seabirds. The tour’s promotional material shows happy swimmers smiling in the sun surrounded by inquisitive lobos marinos. The truth, dear readers, is that in late September the Humboldt Current is still merrily turning this part of the tropics into an extension of Antarctica. It was cloudy, windy, and cold as Dante’s Inferno.

Didn’t matter. I squeezed into my wetsuit and flippers, pulled on my goggles and snorkel gear, jumped in the water, and headed for the sea lions.

Only a guide and one other passenger were brave enough to join me. The water was too murky for the goggles to do any good and the cold went right through my bones and came out the other side. And the smell – no BBC Planet Earth documentary can ever clue you in to the smell of that many animals in one place, doing all the things that animals do (in the water too). Still, I did it!

And that probably answers the question as to whether I’ve lost my mind.

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.