We did a twelve day tour of Peru with EF Go Ahead. The tour is designed to cover several parts of Peru in a fairly limited time.
Our trip began with a long travel day. We left home at 1:30AM for a 5:05AM flight. Thankfully it was an easy drive with very little traffic, although there was more than I expected in those early hours. Julie had picked up some doughnuts from a bakery that opened recently in Tillamook to help keep us awake. We flew two and a half hours from Portland to Denver, two and a half hours to Houston, then six and a half hours to Lima, finally arriving at 11PM Lima time, a total of sixteen hours including the two lay-overs. Our local tour coordinator had exchanged some dollars we had given her earlier so we got some Nuevo Soles when we met her at the Portland airport.
In Lima we found our tour guide Raul at the airport exit. He led us all to a bus and we stowed our luggage then headed into busy, noisy, “intimate,” Lima traffic for a 45-minute drive to our hotel in the Miraflores district, the Casa Andina Premium Miraflores. Between customs at the airport, traffic, and getting everyone checked in, we finally got to bed around 2:30.
We had a nice breakfast buffet and then a short tour orientation meeting at 9AM.
Then we had only a few minutes before we left to go to a cooking class at Sky Kitchen. But first we stopped at a local market to see some of the produce and meats that we would be working with, and what Peruvian food is made from.
Once at the Sky Kitchen restaurant/classroom, our excellent host and instructor introduced us to a variety of local fruits. We tried six different types of plataños and bananas with a range of flavors. There was an oversized bean pod which has cotton-candy-looking fibers in with the beans - you don’t eat the beans (at least not raw) but the fibers are really interesting. The lucuma fruit has the texture of a hard boiled egg yolk (even though it is un-cooked) and is a bit like eating very mild peanut butter but with a butterscotch aftertaste.
Then we chopped up some squash and sweet potatoes that would be boiled and mashed as the base of picarone batter, to which flour and yeast are added and it sits for some time. Picarones are donut-shaped and deep-fried and served with spiced molasses syrup - we would finish making them after the main course.
We also learned to make Pisco Sours. Pisco is Peru’s equivalent of whiskey, and the Pisco Sour is effectively the national cocktail.
Then he taught everyone how to make ceviche (mine had mango instead of fish). He and his efficient crew cleaned everything up while we enjoyed the ceviche with a wonderful passion fruit drink.
We went back to our cooking stations and learned to make Lomo Saltado.
After eating and enjoying that, we made the picarones for dessert.
It ended up being a very tasty and filling meal, and we also got a grounding in some of the basic ingredients of Peruvian dishes and cocktails.
Then we went to the ruins of Huaca Pucllana. It is essentially a giant mound of adobe bricks surrounded by one of Lima’s many neighborhoods. According to the archeologists, the people who built the structures there had a practice or tradition that when they wanted or needed to build new or improved structures, they would simply fill the old building with debris and start a new construction on top. Thus, the archeologists find that each layer they uncover is an earlier generation or period in the civilization that built them, and which conveniently kept building in the same location.
These people considered death to be just another part of the cycle of life, so bodies were desiccated in a fetal position in layers of leaves, cloth wrappings, and a final basket-like covering. Evidence suggests that families would keep their ancestor’s wrapped bodies in their homes, possibly talking to them about the happenings of the day.
At this site and for the rest of the day our guide was Amelia, a woman who has worked off and on as a tour guide since the late 1960’s. She was very knowledgeable and added several funny stories and tidbits of her family history as we passed by schools or other locations on the bus. From the ruins we drove to the center of the old town near the Lima river. Lima seems to be almost all brick and cement buildings, and it feels very urban everywhere - a lot of different aspects differ from what I am used to, but one thing that really stood out was the cable TV and/or phone or internet lines which are strung in tangles above the streets.
The riverfront park was busy - a partly sunny Sunday in winter brought a lot of people out. We walked past the governor’s mansion and went to the central plaza. There are a few very different architectural influences exhibited by the old buildings.
Just off the plaza is a Choco Museo chocolate shop selling Peruvian chocolate. We got to see cacao pods and taste some of the dried beans, then got a brief description of the chocolate-making process along with a number of samples. It was getting late in the day and our day’s itinerary was flipped - the plan was to do the ruins, old town, and sight-seeing bus tour first, then have the cooking class as dinner, but we were doing it backwards for some reason, so we were instructed to resist trying to purchase chocolates and instead were each given a chocolate bar of our choice, then headed back to the bus.
Even with the attempt to hurry up, it got dark mid-way into our sight-seeing bus ride, and Amelia was sometimes difficult to understand, so in the end I kind of wished we had just cut or reduced the sight-seeing portion in exchange for more sleep. Back at the hotel around 8 we had to plan for a 3:45AM departure in the morning. Fortunately we still felt full from all food at the cooking class, so we just stopped at a Tambo (a chain of convenience stores we saw all over Lima) and picked up some snack food and drinks. A bit of snack and checking email, then we tried to get some sleep.