The bug that was bound to happen

While such fine San Francisco restaurants such as Fresca serve up Peruvian food that is muy authentico and also muy delicioso, I am doing all I can to stay away from Peruvian food here in Peru.

Arriving last week from Lima to Cusco required some acclimatization; for a person who has lived her whole life either at or below sea level, suddenly being at 3300 meters was a shock to the system. I did my best, hiking through Inca ruins and bartering for hairy alpaca jumpers in the marketplace, to play the part of the open-minded tourist.

However, when the tour guide I hired off the street took me to a mud hut in a tiny Quechua village for a really "authentic" Peruvian experience, I should have said no to the food. I tried a bite of ch´uño, which is a freeze-dried Andean potato. To be exact, the little brown potatoes are harvested and left in a cold field to rot. Once they have rotted, they are stomped on by the locals´feet (which are not pretty as nobody wears socks, EVER, no matter how cold it gets in the Andes). After being stomped flat and inside-out by cracked feet, they are left in the field again to freeze. Once "preserved" like this, the potatoes will keep in a mud attic for years. Wonder of wonders.

So I tasted the potato, which hadn´t had anything done to it except for being thrown into a bowl with some white rice. It tasted exactly like you think a rotten potato that has been stomped on by filthy feet and then been left to freeze in a field would taste: completely disgusting. I fed the rest of mine to a dog when no-one was looking, but the two polite bites I tood were enough to give me a raging bacterial infection. I languished for a couple of days with a resting heart rate of 170 and extremely low blood pressure, but when my fever reached 40 degrees (celsius), the kind woman at the hostal called a doctor who came to my bedside and immediately gave me a shot. He prescribed a ton of medication including a course of antibiotics that I´m sure weren´t approved by the FDA but made me completely better right away.

So much better, in fact, that I was able to leave for my 4-day trek to Macchu Pichu the next morning, although when on the second morning we were invited into a Quechua hut to see how people in the Andes have always lived, I politely declined the bit of boiled potato that was offered to me.

The Inka Capital

Cusco is an amazing town. The ancient capital of the Inca empire, it has beautiful ruins that were built over by the Spanish in the 1500s. When earthquakes shake the town, the Spanish architecture falls down and the Inca stuff stays.
I´m suffering a bit from the altitude, I hiked around a ruin yesterday for several hours and then drank a couple of Pisco sours last night, BIG MISTAKE. All of the warnings your guidebooks give you to take it easy when you first arrive at a place very high in the mountains (Cusco is at 11,000 feet) are absolutely right. I plan to wander around aimlessly today and eat some fruit.
Tomorrow I´m taking an unofficial tour up into the mountains--a woman approached me on the street to give me a tour of the Temple of the Moon yesterday and I took her up on the offer. Thank goodness I did because it was the best tour I´ve ever had in my life. So tomorrow we are taking the bus for an hour upwards to have lunch with some of her Quechua friends. I´m really excited to spend the afternoon with a traditional Andean family.
I had a really good meal at someone´s home in Lima but will blog about it next time as I am dizzy from computer fumes. I better be a picture of strapping mountain health when I come down out of this place. Thin air makes me feel dopey.

Lima, Peru. Day 1.

Restaurant Girl won´t be getting the scoop on San Francisco restaurants for a few months (you´ll have to turn to The Tablehopper for your juice) as she´s travelled to South America to see how they do things there. So far, no restaurants have been examined, but what I can say is that the bus system in Lima, Peru, is hilarious! Random automobiles of all sizes zoom along the roads, sometimes four deep in a two lane street, honking, and with people hanging out of all windows. One of these people is the bus hawker, who yells out where the bus is going, pounds on the door if the driver should stop, and takes fares (which seem to be completely arbitrary amounts of money). The bus hawker swings himself all over the outside of the moving vehicle, and watching the grannies get a running start from the street and swing themselves up onto the floor of an ancient Mitsubishi van that´s painted all over the outside with things like the Tasmanian devil and sayings like ¨Read the Bible¨(in Spanish, of course), is much more fun than waiting tables for now.