Saturday 21 November 2015

Foodie Corner: Astrid y Gaston

Vern.  

Chef Gastón Acurio is a legend throughout South America, and his “Astrid y Gaston” establishment in Lima, which takes Peruvian cuisine to five star heights, is currently ranked #14 amongst the world’s top 50 restaurants.   It wasn’t the ONLY reason to spend time in Lima, but it was high on my list! :)    

(Note:  I'm adding this entry in late December, sorry for the delay, we are now a long way from Lima.) 

Planning two months ahead, we reserved a lunch seating featuring Head Chef Diego Muñoz’s 10-course tasting menu.  I opted for the wine pairing to complete the culinary experience.

Astrid y Gaston lived up to reputation and expectation:  the food was spectacular and the service impeccable.   Each course was exquisitely presented.  Even Carolyn, a fan of neither fish nor seafood enjoyed the first half of the menu, which was largely ocean-based.
I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves, including the one of the menu. 

Had we not sold the house so as to remain unencumbered throughout our voyage, the visit might have prompted a second mortgage… and it would have been worth it! 







Amazon Jungle

Cooper. The Amazon Jungle is the biggest rainforest in the world, and it is very, very hot and humid too. We flew to Iquitos, Peru which is a city in the middle of the Amazon Jungle - and it is also the biggest city in the world that you cannot reach by road (only river and plane). It has a population of 800,000 people. We arrived in Iquitos on November 12 and left a week later on November 19, staying a total of 3 nights in Iquitos, and 4 nights in the jungle itself.

To get to our lodge in the jungle, it was an approx 2½ hour boat ride down the Amazon River. We stayed at a nice place called Otorongo Lodge which, in the high season, has about 30 people there at one time, but we were there in the low season, so there were only 5 of us. We saw many different animals, like: sloths, caiman (a small crocodile), many different frogs, pink river dolphins, grey river dolphins, wild dogs, monkeys, lots of birds (parrots, toucans, and too many others to list), tarantulas as big as an adult’s hand, capybaras (like rats the size of beavers - they are officially the biggest rodents on the planet), and lots of fish (piranhas that we caught, catfish also that we caught, and other types of fish we saw in the rivers).

The Amazon River is about 2 kms wide where we were, which is already VERY wide.  It can get much wider in the rainy season (3-4 kms wide) as it floods into the surrounding forests every Feb-May; and it also gets much wider as it goes toward the ocean (in some places we're told you can't even see across to the other shore, the distance is so far). The length of the whole river is about 6450 kms.  Sometimes it doesn't feel like you're on a river, it feels like you're in the middle of a big lake; but when you get nearer the shore to see how fast the water is moving past, then you realize how fast the current is, and you remember that you are on a river, not a lake. The only down side about the jungle is the malaria mosquitoes, but we are taking medications to help prevent it.

There were many activities to do (and we did them all). We swam in the river, all 3 of us! We also hiked through the jungle lots, including a trail to see a huge tree, visited local villages (including a school), and saw giant lily pads that are bigger than me! We took our boat to see if we could spot the unique river dolphins, and then also saw them every day on our boat trips to see other things too. We hiked through grasses taller than me - it felt like a scene from the movie 'Honey I Shrunk the Kids'. My dad and I even went out camping in the jungle for one night. We used real machetes to chop jungle vines out of our way.

We went fishing twice while at the lodge, once for piranhas, and once for stingrays. We all successfully caught a piranha (12 keepers big enough to eat). When we went to fish for stingrays, no luck, but my dad and I caught a catfish each, big enough to take back to the lodge to eat. The cool thing that the lodge does is that if you catch some fish, they cook it and put it out to eat on the table for lunch or dinner. Here is a picture of me catching a piranha. They have very sharp and pointy teeth!


The meals in the jungle were great. At breakfast we got eggs, bread, cereal + milk, and a local type of bacon. For lunch there was chicken or fish, bread, potatoes, and rice. For dinner: catfish (which was really good, even though I don’t like seafood/fish), bread, rice, and potatoes. Our room was a family cabin behind the main lodge, because the main lodge rooms were all for only 2 people each. Here is a photo of our room. 


After our 4 nights, 5 days in the jungle, we headed back to Iquitos, which was an approx 3½ hour boat ride up river. Out in the jungle, it’s full of peaceful, natural bird sounds, so it’s a big difference to go back to the city again. In Iquitos, their local ‘taxi’ is called a ‘moto-taxi’ (and in India, the same vehicle is called a ‘tuk-tuk’). It is a small 3-wheeled motorcycle with no doors. There are also LOTS of motorcycles. It is not very common to own or see a full-sized car in Iquitos, because it is so hard to get vehicles into this city - they must be shipped on a plane or by river. Here is a picture of us moving in one of their moto-taxis! 



Also, to see pictures from our world trip so far, click this link:
Trip Photo Album


Thursday 19 November 2015

Piranha: Eat Them Before They Eat You


Vern.

Fishing for Piranha in the Amazon. The logic is simple:  eat them before they can eat you.   


We settled into ‘the perfect spot’ along one of the Amazon's tributaries.  Our trusty guide Goseis (ho-see-us) got each of us set up with a fishing pole – a simple stick with string, a hook and a weight - along with raw meat for bait.   Our patience was tested, but after an hour I pulled a small piranha from the river.  However, as with a number of our other near-catches, it detached itself from my line while still over the water.  Not about to give up, I reached over in a reflex reaction and batted the falling fish into the boat.  The piranha was not about to give up either, however, and sunk its teeth into my pant leg in passing.  Goseis, who had seen the whole thing, was in stitches at the front of the boat.  The fish held on long enough for Carolyn to get a picture of my unwanted hitchhiker before it fell to the floor.  The half dozen or so piranha that we brought in made for a tasty lunch.





To see more pictures from our world trip so far, click this link: Trip Photo Album  (more pics from the Amazon to be added soon)



Sunday 1 November 2015

Halloween in Arequipa, Peru

Cooper.  During the week before Halloween, we were surprised to suddenly see a few plastic jack-o-lanterns for sale in some corner stores; but we didn't see much anything else being sold for Halloween, and so we weren't sure that Halloween would really be here.

When we asked our teachers at our current Spanish school (mom & dad who have 4 kids), they said that Halloween in Arequipa has only become popular in the last few years. Because of that, the city hasn’t really got a good idea of what Halloween should be quite like other than ‘the kids want candy’.

Our instructors invited me to join their family on Halloween night, which was really nice of them to do and it was fun.

Instead of like it is in Canada, where everybody goes from house to house and says “Trick or Treat!”, in Arequipa no houses have any candy, in fact many households don’t even believe in Halloween. But families and kids can go around from store to store, restaurant to restaurant, and barber shop to dentist office on all the busiest roads in the city. It's a little crazy, with lots of people trying to cross these busy streets and there are hardly any traffic lights that work - but it is like this every day! 

For Halloween, my original plan was to get my face painted, but then I decided instead to get a small costume at the local market. My rainbow wig has multi-colours on the back (which you can't see very well in this picture). Observe its awesomeness:



I don’t know how much trick or treating you do, if any, but in Canada I always get lots of candy (spending about 3-4 hours doing it). It's really different here! Unlike at home, where I need 2 large bags to hold all of the treats, here my one small bag isn’t even a quarter full (for about the same amount of time) - and I even got a few flyers and coupons from some of the businesses.



These things aren't bad, just differences in another country, as we knew there would be. The next holiday is Christmas, where we plan to be in Rio, Brazil. We’ll see what the differences are then, too.


Carolyn.  As Cooper mentioned, Halloween is new in Arequipa;  our Spanish instructors explained that it has only come about from local people seeing North American movies and TV shows...and actually Vern and I think it's sad that this outside influence is now shaping Peruvian culture.  We would have been content, even pleased, to learn that Peru did not have Halloween (even though Cooper was VERY happy to go out trick-or-treating!).

Having said that, the major missing thing here is the lack of packaging and marketing of specialized Halloween candy. Any of the candy that was given out by the participating businesses is only the 'normal' candy that can be bought here - generally they had a bag of individually wrapped hard candies on their counter, and would then give out ONE candy per kid.  No mini-chocolate bars, no mini-packs of Skittles, Smarties, etc, no small bags of potato chips or cheezies.  All these candies/snacks exist here in their full sizes in the corner stores and large supermarkets, but it obviously has not occurred to any manufacturers or distributors to bring the Halloween merchandising of their products here.  Good.