El río en las Amazonas es negro como el café

El río en las Amazonas es negro como el café y en el atardecer el contraste con el sol brillante amarillo, naranja, y rosado fue uno de los atardeceres más impresionantes que he visto en todos mis viajes. Regresábamos en el barco pequeño, para seis personas, muy contentos porque acabamos de nadar con los delfines. Había más o menos seis delfines a 20 pies de nosotros, y el guía me había dicho que nadara como un delfín para atraer los delfines, y funcionó. Cuando nadaba subiendo y bajando los delfines se me acercaron un poco más.

También vimos un delfín rosado con su hijo al lado. Los delfines rosados son unicos y casi misteriosos. Hay muchos mitos sobre ellos como que los raptan a las chicas del pueblo o les embarazan. Creo que una razón por eso es que es muy difícil tomar una foto de ellos porque no pueden saltar tan alto como los delfines grises. Tienen el color rosado por los vasos de sangre cerca de la superficie de la piel. Cuando ellos se están moviendo mucho, están felices, o tienen miedo, su color se vuelve más fuerte. Entonces los delfines rosados se sonrojan como los humanos.

Cuando estuvimos caminando en el bosque y viajando en el barco, vimos otros animales aparte de los delfines, monos, micos perezosos, serpientes, ranas venenosas, e incluso caimanes. 

La cosa que más me sorprendió pasó en un pueblo indígena donde nos quedamos una noche. Ellos se cazaron un caimán, un mono, y un jabalí. No pensaba que fuera legal cazar esos animales y nuestro guía nos explicó que los indígenas son los únicos que pueden cazarlos y solo para consumo personal porque es una parte de su cultura. El opinión del guía fue que incluso si hubieron leyes prohibiéndolo no dejarían de hacerlo.

La mañana siguiente comimos caimán frito por el desayuno. El sabor es como pollo pero es más masticable. Lo comimos con arroz, patacones, y un pimentón picante. Si alguien me dijera que había comido caimán por el desayuno en el las Amazonas pensaría que fuera una broma. Tampoco, nunca pensaba que dormiría en una casa de pilotes en el Río Amazona y amanecería para comer caimán.

Además comimos mucho pescado incluyendo piraña. Por supuesto comimos muchas frutas, la más común entre ellas se llama la copa azul. La gente del pueblo hace jugos, helados, y deliciosas paletas con la fruta, la cual tiene un sabor entre guanábana y algo amargo.

En primer lugar viajo para conocer otra gente y otras maneras de hacer las cosas. En segundo lugar para la experiencia de probar la comida y en tercer lugar para ver y hacer cosas interesantes. Si conocería gente como la de las Amazonas, comería cosas, y haría cosas tan increíbles y sorprendentes que cada viaje, sería lo mejor.   

Jeep! Jeep!

Una silla, una bicicleta, los pollos en la jaula, algunas hoyas para la sopa, el radio, la linterna, los platos con flores, mis botas de la lluvia, el grande foto de Jesús en un marco de oro, y….ya estamos listos! El fin de semana pasada fui al desfile anual de Yipao en Armenia. Los jeeps que están en Armenia estuvieron importados por el ejército Colombiano después del segunda guerra mundial. Aunque, pronto la gente en el eje cafetero le dio cuenta que son muy útiles en las carreras de barro en las montañas y ya los jeeps transportan:

Fruta

Flores

Gente

Cada cosa de la casa que puedes imaginar

¡Y por supuesto-el café más rico del mundo!

Porque iba a llover, y además tuvimos sed, mis dos amigas y yo nos sentábamos en la sección cubierta de antioquena, el aguardiente de Armenia. Nos regalaron unos bonitos collares de flores y chupas, y estuvimos contentas. 

Todas las familias, los viejos, y las parejas estaban tan felices para mirar el desfile y estaban aclamando y chiflando con entusiasmo ¡No hubiera podido imaginar que el ambiente estaría llena de tanta excitación! 

Me encantaba el orgullo que tuveira la gente de Armenia de sus campesinos y sus productos. 

Además, los colombianos deben ser orgullosos. Colombia es el tercero en producción del café en el mundo (antes de Brazil y recientemente Vietnam) y es considerado como unos de los productores de la calidad más alta. 

En honesto, fue una dia bonita para vivir en el eje cafetero y estar parte de la atmosfera tan comunitaria.

Familia

I stayed with a host family with two adorable girls. Illa is 6 and Chami is 5. They go to a bilingual school, and they had an english spelling bee one night. Illa spelled Zebra wrong and spelled Sunday and Monday correct. Chami couldn’t remember any of her words. The girls reminded me of my cousins in the US. In the evenings they watched the disney chanel, and they were going to different activities after school almost every day-karate, soccer, and sewing class. I'm actually most sad that I lost the photos of the girls.

Lots of the extended family live nearby, and were always stopping in for a chat or food. Which is very much like my parent's house.

Liz, the mom, made all meals from scratch including the sauces and juices like watermelon and chicha and pina (purple corn and pineapple). My favorite meal was a whitish yellow sauce that had potatoes and cheese curd in it and was served over rice with hard boiled egg and olives. I think it is called huancaina sauce.

Peru is greater than Machu Picchu but Machu Picchu=Awesome

Machu Picchu is awesome in the truest sense of the word. One of the magical and intriguing parts about Machu Picchu, is that no-one knows exactly why so much effort and time was put into building it. Some say it was a religious pilgrimage site or a vacation home for Incan royals. Hiram Bingham, the Yale professor and explorer who found Machu Picchu in 1911, hoped it was the lost city of Vilcabamba where the Incas fled from the Spanish with some of their sacred posessions. However, Vilcabamba has still not been found. A more recent theory is that Machu Picchu was a private university for Incan elite.

Some other aweome things about Machu Picchu:

• Machu Picchu is on top of a mountain that is encircled by the Urubamba River, or Sacred River.
• It is aligned with sun in many ways to create things like a compass on a rock. Also the rising and setting of the sun lines up with religious mountains during solstices and equinoxes.
• The stars align in certain patterns on rocks to signify planting seasons.
• There are lots of colorful flowers all over, which is not what I expected next to the stone building and terraces. And 3 new types of orchids were found in the area last year.

It is thought to be such a spiritual and sacred place that Wayna Picchu was built soley to view Machu Picchu. We climbed Wayna Picchu, and it was a really steep climb, where we were pulling ourselves up with our hands at some points, and crawling through a small cave on all fours, and walking down steep, steep, small stairs. The best part was when I climbed up this ladder, through huge rocks, and emerged to a view of Machu Picchu in front of me.

 

R-O-C-K (very ancient rock)

What is this? Limestone. What is limestone? It is a rock. R-O-C-K. Do not forget. Why is there no no roof here? The Incas would look up at Venus. And what else? Mars. And what else? The stars. S-T-A-R-S. This was the rhetorical question-spelling bee-style tour my Sacred Valley tour guide thought was the best way to make ancient Incan history come alive to foreigners. I did not learn that the terraces, the the ones in Pisac below, were built by the Incas to create mico-climates in order to grow a variety of crops, and that is one of the reasons they have something like 80 varities of potatoes in Peru. I was told the terraces were for erosion and decoratin, which is partially true, but not the coolest answer. I learned alot of neat things about the Incas later in Machu Picchu.

Plaza Mayor

Drinking Cusquena, the local watery beer, and eating tequenas, fried bread/small tocish with cheese in the middle and guac on the side I observe from a balcony above Plaze Mayor:


Traditional dancers in front of the cathedral, flute music, women in bright cloth hoop skirts holding baby lamas and charging tourists for photos, taxi cabs, hippies with no shoes, fountain with a gold statue, whistling taxi drivers looking for passengers, northface store, police officers with white gloves, white helmet and orange vest, men selling paintings in cardboard folders, Starbucks, giggling school girls in navy jumpers and white knee socks, men selling sunglasses, men selling flowers, statue of San Cristobal glowing on the hill like in Rio, stray dogs, American study abroad students wearing bright baggy textile pants.

Chicha is sort of like beer

I’m not usually a tour-bus type of traveler. All of the on-the bus-off the bus-30 minutes here for shopping-welcome to this jewelry store my uncle owns-here is another market for shopping-eat at this really expensive restaurant. Not my thing. However, sometimes it’s necessary in order to see what you want to see in a timely fashion, especially when traveling alone. I took a tour like this to see the Sacred Valley when I was in Cusco. When life gives me shopping opportunities I don’t desire, I try to meet the locals.

During the Sacred Valley tour, we stopped in a market in a town called Ollantomtambo, which is where the train station to go to Machu Picchu is, if that sounds familiar to any reader. When told to be back on the bus in 30 minutes, I decided this was good time to try chicha, the Peruvian traditional corn beer. I had heard that a broom with a plastic bag over it mounted outside of a door meant this was a Chicheria (place where they make chicha). So, as my bus mates tried to decipher if the sweaters they wanted to buy were real alpaca or not, I wandered the cobblestone side streets outside of the market in search of a chicheria. This adventure definitely reeked with an air of Harry Potter, Diagon Alley, butter beer, and I loved it.

It didn’t take too long to find my broom, and I peeked my head inside the concrete doorway to find two toothless men sitting on a bench in front of a multicolored mound of corn, and drinking yellow liquid out of oversized mason jars. Jackpot! “Este es una chicheria?” (This is a Chicheria?) I said in my sweetest- childish Spanish voice. The men on the bench looked at me, then at each other, then at me again with confused expressions. I tried again “Quiero probar chicha” (I want to try chicha). Though my childish Spanish sounds a bit rude and demanding, they were forgiving. They brightened and one of the men shouted a gummy “senora, senora” at a concrete room to the side.

A little old lady in a long gray skirt and white apron wobbled to the door and beckoned me in. She ladeled the foamy yellow liquid out of a huge black kettle, and charged me 50 centimos in soles, which is something like 20 cents USD. I gave her one sol, and when she reached in her apron to find me change, I said she could keep the rest for herself. Her eyes widened, and for a second I thought maybe she wanted more money, because this is about $2 USD, but her smile told me she was really happy to have this, and it also told me tourists do not frequent her “bar.”

The men outside had risen from the bench to greet their new drinking buddy. They told me their names were Louis and Alfredo, and we exchanged some normal first meeting in a pub type questions. They asked me where I was from, how old I was, do I like Peru. I like to give these questions back to foreigners to see what they say. I asked them where they thought I was from, and they said Scandinavia, which was a first for me (I’m not blonde). Louis and Alfredo were in their 40s, and have lived in Ollontomtambo their whole lives. They hadn’t met many Americans so they don’t know if they like them. I knew I was going to do my best to give a good impression for my whole country.

The men were eager to give me a tour of the chicha brewery. I picked up several heads of corn from the mound which looked like a patchwork quilt of purple, orange, red, and yellow and they told me that in Peru there are two types of chicha the yellow kind we were drinking, and the chicha morado-which stains your lips a purple-reddish color. Next to the pile of corn was a wheel barrel with the kernels of corn inside and drying out. And then there was a basket with some liquid and corn kernels inside which had sprouted plant-like growths. The men told me this is where the chicha germinates. It takes about a month to ferment, and they sell the chicha in the market and around the town of Ollontomtambo.

The chicha was room temperature and tasted like frothy, wet, dirty corn. The taste and the alcohol content were both mild and for these reasons I was able to drink almost all of a huge cup before shopping time was up, and I had to make a dash back to the bus. I explained that I had to meet my friends, and Louis happily received the rest of my chicha into his mug. I hope Louis and Alfredo also received as friendly a memory of Americans as I did of those in Ollontomtambo.