ARGENTINA AND BRAZIL: OUR LONGEST/SHORTEST VACATION EVER, PART I (GETTING THERE)

March 10-11, 2020

I still have a few more posts to write about a trip we took last June, but I have to record last week's adventure while it is still fresh in my mind.

We put months into planning a trip to South America, starting with a flight to Iguazu Falls on the Brazil/Argentina border, continuing on to Buenos Aires, and ending in the Patagonia regions of Argentina and Chile.  My brother and sister-in-law are humanitarian missionaries for our church. They are based in Buenos Aires but travel all over Argentina as well as occasionally to neighboring countries. They help with the fitting and distribution of wheelchairs to low-income individuals, providing medical equipment to hospitals, creating and distributing school kits, etc. They have been serving eight months, and we were excited to spent the first half of our trip with them.

Unfortunately, we were set on a collision course with the COVID-19 pandemic, which began quietly three months before our trip when the first patient infected with a previously unknown virus entered a hospital in Wuhan, China. On January 21, 2020, the first case of someone with the same virus was confirmed in the United States. Preventive measures began. On February 5, a Princess cruise ship with 3,600 passengers began a quarantine in Yokohama, Japan, and eventually 218 of those passengers aboard were diagnosed with the virus.

An image of the COVID-19 virus from here

On February 11, the disease was given the name COVID-19, an acronym for Coronavirus Disease 2019. The total number of cases had risen to 44,653 in 24 countries.

On February 24, the US had 35 confirmed cases and no deaths. On February 26, Latin America had its first case, a Brazilian man who had recently returned from Italy. On February 29, the US had its first death and announced restrictions involving travel to and from Italy and South Korea. On March 10, there were 259 cases of COVID-19 in the United States.

And that gets us to the day we were scheduled to leave for our Argentina Adventure. Things were crazy in China, South Korea, and Europe, and cases were just beginning to pick up in the United States, but South America was almost virus free, with just a few cases and no known community transmission. There were no travel warnings or advisories regarding any of the places we planned to go. We weren't cavalier about making the decision to go ahead with our plans. It seemed that we would be okay, and the prevalent thought was that COVID-19 would not spread in South America because it was summer there.

PERU: MUSHROOMS IN THE JUNGLE

Did you know there are about 14,000 known varieties of mushrooms? That's a lot of fungus amongus. I read recently that the itt-bitty spores of mushrooms are the hardest naturally-made substance on Earth. They are very durable. In fact, there are actually scientists who think mushroom spores are capable of space travel and that some fungi found on Earth may have originally came from outer space! (I think that if you believe this, you just might be from outer space yourself.)

Americans are relatively light mushroom eaters. On average, we consume 4 lbs./person/year. However ASIAN-Americans eat an average of 9 lbs./person/year. In Asia itself, the Chinese consume an average of 22 lbs./person/year, and in Japan it is a whopping 29 lbs./person/year.

Mushroom farming is picking up speed in the U.S., and wild mushroom foraging is becoming a very popular hobby. See this website if you are interested in foraging. Some people have a business of harvesting wild mushrooms from remote areas they keep secret, then selling those mushrooms to upscale restaurants for large sums of money. Who knew?

We saw many mushroom varieties in Peru that we had either never seen before or seen only in pictures. We didn't have the courage to try eating any of them. It's probably a good thing. Here are a few:

The colors and shapes were wonderful--much more variety than the ones we get in our lawn in California. We were wishing Andrew, our budding mycologist, had been with us to help identify them.

So that's it--the highlights of our Great Peruvian Adventure. It's only taken about two months to process it all on this blog, but now that I'm done, I'm wondering:

WHERE ARE WE GOING NEXT, BOB????

PERU: BUGS AND BIRDS AND BATS, OH MY! Peruvian Animal Adventures, Part 2

As previously mentioned, once we got to the jungle, we didn't see any domesticated animals (other than dogs, of course). When we first got to our cabanas, we did see these little guys sneaking around the grounds:

At first we thought they were capybaras, but we learned later that they were agoutis, rodents related to the guinea pig but larger and with much longer legs.

This, if you can believe it, is a termite nest high up on the trunk of a very tall tree. The black viney-looking stuff curling around the trunk below the nest is actually a tunnel, built by the termites, which they take to get from their nest to the ground.

This snail was at least as big as my hand:
A "cute" little tree snake:
A true centipede:
I hate spiders, I really do. This tarantula was humongous:

And this was the biggest spider web I have ever seen. Ever. It was at least 12 feet long:
A beautiful moth:
And an unusual cricket:
Bats lined up like on a tree trunk during the daytime:
A monkey leaping from branch to branch:
What the natives call a "stinky bird." Apparently it has exceptionally bad breath:
A beautiful blue and gold macaw:

This gorgeous bird, called a "trogon," lives in the top of the rainforest canopy:

And our final wild animal sighting, a caiman, swimming in the Madre de Dios River at night. I'm glad I was in a boat!

UPCOMING: 'SHROOMS (Final Peruvian post)

PERU: BUGS AND BIRDS AND BATS, OH MY! Peruvian Animals, Part 1

This post is somewhat inappropriately titled since for the first half of our trip, the only animals we saw were domesticated ones. However, I didn't think a post entitled "Llamas and Dogs" sounded all that interesting. The bugs and birds and bats will be featured in the follow-up to this post.

I love llamas. I think you'll be able to figure that out by looking at these pictures:

Isn't this cute? A llama chilling with two women down the street from our hotel.

We saw lots of llamas at Machu Picchu.

In fact, they use llamas to mow the grass there. Genius.

Aren't they CUTE? I want to have one in my backyard. Think of what we could save on gardeners and fertilizer! (A pet llama would certainly be preferable to a pet rattlesnake, don't you think? I DO.)

Even the Peruvians themselves think llamas are cute. In fact, they like them so much that they had one sculptor put a llama on this poor lady's head. (Actually, they asked for a FLAME to be on her head, and the Spanish word or flame is "llama," and, well, you get the idea.)

In case you, like this sculptor, are confused about llamas, this poem should help:

The one-l lama,
He's a priest.
The two-l llama,
He's a beast.
And I will bet
A silk pajama
There isn't any
Three-l lllama.

--Ogden Nash

Okay, let's move on.

Other than llamas, the animal we saw the most of was dogs. They were EVERYWHERE. I've never seen so many dogs in my life. If happiness is a warm puppy (thank you, Charles Schultz), Peruvians are the happiest people on earth.
This poor lady obviously doesn't have a dog, so she had to take her donkey out for a walk instead. (Still better than walking a rattlesnake.)

And these Peruvians are REALLY confused about why their dogs make such funny noises:

So there you have it. Llamas and dogs.

As a preview of my next Peruvian Animal Post, here is a picture of a lovely visitor to our hotel room in Aguas Calientes:
Totally creepy. (But they get bigger in the Amazon.)

PERU: WHEN YOU TRAVEL WITH BOB YOU EAT INTERESTING THINGS

Bob loves to eat. Bob LIVES to eat. This makes him a fun travel companion because we always make an effort to seek out the best of the local cuisine.

At LAX, the best local cuisine was found in the See's Candy store. (After all, it was Valentine's Day!)

We ate breakfast in our hotel in Lima the first morning. This is eggs benedict, made with salmon instead of ham. Oh. My. Goodness.

Our very first lunch in Lima was also absolutely incredible. It was a buffet of traditional Peruvian foods and we ate and ate and ate and ate and ate.

This is ceviche, the national dish of Peru. It is raw fish "cooked" in lemon juice. It was fabulous. Here's a sampling of the cold dishes. The green and yellow pinwheels at the very bottom of the plate are called causa, which is mashed potatoes rolled around a filling. The filling in the green one is octopus and spinach. The purple stuff on the left is octopus in a tasty sauce. There is ceviche in the mussel shell, and the pink meat at the top is a Peruvian specialty that became one of my favorites: trucha (raw red trout).
And here are some of the hot dishes: rocoto relleno (stuffed pepper), arroz con pollo (the green one), sangrecita (cooked blood--not found on MY plate pictured below, but on Bob's), chicharrones (a lot like spicy fried chicken), etc.
The other dish we saw on practically every menu in Peru was lomo saltado, strips of beef fried with vegetables and served over french fries:

We waddled out of that meal, but it was a good warm-up for what was yet to come in other fine dining establishments, including lobster thermidor . . .

. . . and rice-stuffed squid (which was actually much better than it looks here).
For a little background on our next two dishes, you need to know that month or so before our trip, Bob bought a book called Eating in Peru. He determined what were the MUST HAVES: cuy (guinea pig) and alpaca (an animal like a llama but smaller and with much finer wool).

We got especially excited to try cuy when we got to Cusco and saw this interesting painting of The Last Supper in one of the cathedrals: Note the dish in the foreground. That's cuy being served. If that's what was served for The Last Supper, it had to be good!

We found a great restaurant where the cuy was cooked in an enormous clay oven,

then served in two different ways:Cuy #1

Cuy #2

They did a pretty amazing job on the alpaca as well,
served here in a beautiful, tasty pool of quinoa. The meat was tender and flavorful, like an exceptionally good beef steak.

I think out of everything new I tried, my favorite was the trucha (trout filets), shown below as an appetizer.
A close runner-up would be this absolutely amazing rocoto relleno (stuffed pepper), stuffed with a whole egg, rice, and cheese and served in a quinoa sauce.

Everything we ate was served with great artistry, from main dishes to desserts.

At the end of our trip, when there was no more room anywhere in my body for more fattening food, I ate this delicious fruit plate (starfruit, watermelon, papaya, and passion fruit, which was a tart seed in a gelatinous base) served with a little dish of honey for sweetening.

Sadly, all good things must come to an end, including our culinary quests in Peru.

This is one of our last meals together. Do we look fatter? I'm glad Bob and I are at the other end of the table...

Overall, I'd have to say the food in Peru far exceeded our expectations. We were blown away by the uniqueness and variety in the cuisine (no refried beans or tortillas--which is how we Norte Americanos stereotype all the food south us), as well as by the artistry with which it was served. Which of these delectable dishes would YOU like to try?