fresh n juicy chunks of oyster :: RTW travel blog

My search for a genuine cuyeria (guinea pig eatery) has landed me in a back-alley back-yard restaurant where I'm sitting and sipping on a strawberry-vomit flavoured drink. Unfortunately cuy (guinea pig) seems mostly available on the weekends as a special treat.
Sheesh, that's the problem with trying to write contemporaneously, things never stay the same way for long: the delicious main course had arrived and only one half of it is still in existence and I have ordered a coke leaving the frutillada (ugh) to sit there and ferment. Oh, and the slightly spicy, green salsa they have here tastes incredible. How about I just freeze time to spare you all the slightly dull details of my diet?
And since we are on diet (ha!), I did eat guinea pig yesterday at a tourist joint but it tasted like tough, skinny rabbit so that's why I'm still looking for the genuine article.
But seriously folks, I have done more than just eat here. In my attempt to become the foremost authority on Incas in Cusco I bought this book that was written by a near-blind historian about 150 years ago - umm, and have yet to read much more than the prefaces. Partly to blame are indeed Cusco's bars which irresponsibly hand out free Cuba Libres and with a bit of blagging and bar hopping seal the night making bed time reading impossible.
On the cultural flip-side of the coin I have tried to pre-empt the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu and walked, horsed, bussed and hitchhiked to more ruins I wanted to manage in this time.
Cusco lies in the so-called 'Sacred Valley' which does deserve the title in my humble opinion. The land looks fertile (to my highly trained agriculture-eye) and most of the mountains have been landscaped into terraces which already on the bus to Cusco immediately looked quintessentially Incan to me although I can't remember having ever seen them before in such a context. I think more than the temples and ruins - which often require a lot imagination to even recognise as temples or ruins owing to the Spaniards' infatuation here of building huge churches out of other cultures' houses - it was the terraces and the landscape that have hit me so far. They seem as though gods have set to work on the mountains and the valley to make them inhabitable to humans.
The ruins at Pisaq, however, were very impressive to me. Probably mostly because of the natural-high-phenomenon which I had previously been often told existed but always attributed to fairy tales told to keep kids on the straight and narrow. In this case the phenomenon was triggered by sweating like a pig after climbing up steep slopes at high altitude and being hormonally rewarded after seeing the view and my first proper Inca ruins.
Which I hear is more or elss what the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu is all about, so I may get bored. Good thing that you can enhance natural highs unnaturally.
Soso, dinner is long finished, the pink-vomit is still sitting there, fermenting, a band has started playing and I have asked for the bill. And time's been unfrozen too. Which means I'll have to do some shopping, upload photos and these ramblings and then make myself learn about Incas from the near-blind historian. I hear when you're wise you get higher. Naturally. Which may at least reduce any craving for free Cuba Libres while sweating like a pig on the trail for the next 5 days. Let's just hope I won't O.D. on the endorphins and seratonin.

[Too much time wasting had gone on after writing this post which means I probably won't read any of the book...
But click here for Album Peru 1.
A final note - everyone can now download all the pictures at the full resolution they were taken at - including all the panoramas (including Iguacu falls) which may make for good desktop backgrounds although I wouldnt currently know. Didn't realise there was a setting I could jiggle to enable this option on the gallery page. Just click on the medium size pic to get the full one.]