Manjar

Jack — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:19:30 +0000

Hello. My last post was about Lima or the Nazca lines I think so I have a lot of days to cover. We headed high up into the Andes and met herds of beautiful llama like creatures. One day we camped on top of the High Plateau and I was almost able to join a herd of bouncing, brown eyed wild llamas. Unfortunately we left before I became one with the llama. We spent a few days in the high plateau looking at chinchillas and getting altitude sickness before descending and heading towards Cusco. When we were right outside of Cusco we found out that the Shining Path was threatening to kidnap America tourists in Cusco and that is why we drove through Cusco. Once we left Cusco we came to a small village with a kind of big Sunday market that we bought pasta and spoons at. The market was full of tiny, old, women cutting giant gourds open with saws and booths made of tarps and sticks selling cubes of sea weed and sacks of coco leaves. When walking around I found a small hole in the wall store that sold this sixteen stringed instrument kind of like a mandolin but every group of strings was a different chord instead of a single note. The shop was full of guys drinking beer and holding instruments. After a few hours spent at the market, we drove on towards Puno. We spent many days and nights in rural Peru going to hot springs and driving past small towns. Eventually we made it to the city of Puno. We stopped in Puno and have remained stopped for a while now. Puno is nice. It’s right on the shores of Lake Titicaca. Puno has a large artisan market but every booth sells pretty much the same things, except this one booth I found that sold leopard pelts and tortuous shells. If you head up towards the center of town there are lots of colorfully dressed women selling hats and gloves. The older ladies here stick coco leaves to their faces, I don’t really know why but I think it’s so that sweat is absorbed into the leaf so when they chew it, the sweat juice squirts out. One of my favorite thing about the people here is that most of the women wear this beautiful hat that is sort of mushroom shaped and doesn’t fit over their heads. Ryan and my mother have started that hat thing that you probably know about but if you don’t I’ll summarize: There are people all over that try to sell you things on the street, a lot of the time the people are so desperate to sell you their wares that they’re near tears. These people sell their things for hardly any money ($4.00 for a hand knitted alpaca hat) so Ryan came up with the idea that people donate money to us so we can buy large quantities of hats from people to stimulate the local economy and make some old ladies week. As I write this I am actually wearing a hat that we bought.
Yesterday we were walking down a street full of booths that the people who live here buy from and we came across a place the sold nothing but herbs and aborted llama fetuses. It was kind of really creepy because, you know, there were two hundred or so dried up, black, unborn llama babies in boxes all over the place. Apparently when you’re making a new house or building your ‘supposed’ to kill a llama on top of the land that your building on for the earth god, but if you’re too poor you can just shove a llama fetus under your house and call it good.
Pastries here are usually stuffed with the scrumptious sludge called Manjar (pronounced man- har). This sludge is brown and can be sold in small tubes as candy I think. When we were over by the fetus’ we came across an old, coco leaf, covered lady who sold large sacks full of small tubes of Manjar for a $1.20. I have no idea what’s in Manjar and it’s probably horrible for you but I’ve ate about a pound of Manjar since yesterday. This last bit is a little unrelated to Puno or South America in general but I can play Come Sail Away by Styx on my pan pipes, bagpipes, and mandolin now which I’m pretty dang proud of.
This blog post is over now. I like Puno. Good bye.

Lima and whatnot

Jack — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 02:27:29 +0000

We’re still in Peru. The desert is hot and uncomfortable at times. The night is also pretty hot and I’ve developed a habit of sleeping without blankets or clothing. I long time ago, my headphones broke and I’ve been stuck listening to the sounds of traffic or nonstop Taylor Swift while driving, but thankfully I was able to replace them the other day.
One of the things I love about the desert is its lack of trees or shrubbery, because, it makes it 90% easier to find things on the ground such as: cool rocks, crystals, cool rocks with crystals, and so on. The other day we stopped to camp on a road next to a few, kind of giant sand dunes. The Kind of Giant Sand Dunes were kind of really big and were home to almost nothing living, but festering with stones and pretty rocks. I was out and about during the early hours of the day, looking for fossils and pretty stones and things of that nature, when I came upon a vain of quartz that lay there exposed above the Kind of Giant Sand Dunes. The vain of quartz I found was crumbling apart and many semi large boulders of the stone could be found. Inside a few blocks of this “quartz” I found many quartz crystals molded into the shape that of prisms. I now have a ton of crystals in a bag under my bed from the Kind of Giant Sand Dunes.
We’ve come a long way since the Kind of Giant Sand Dunes. Now we’re in a desert that’s less flattering and much rockier, but that’s okay because those famous lines and shapes of animals and such are here. Tomorrow, it’s possible, that maybe, we might, go flying over top these Nazca lines. It really is impossible to see them from the ground. I always had the impression that you would at least notice long line shaped strands running along the desert but apparently you don’t.
We were in Lima the other day. Back where I come from there’s this city called Anchorage and Lima looked a lot like a bigger, more spread out Anchorage. We stayed in Lima for a few days because our car broke down, right outside of it. It took my father and some mechanic guys a few days to get all the parts and stuff to fix are car, but soon it was ship shape and ready to drive out on the town. We went to a museum and looked at pots and stuff of that sort. The part of the museum that interested me, and that I really cared about was the top floor which was dedicated to pictures about the 1980-1991 Shining Path conflict. I don’t really want to go into detail about that right now. In Lima, we went to this fountain park that had the world’s tallest fountain ever. I like fountains but I don’t like the noise they make and sadly, every single one of these fountains made noise. There was a wonderful laser/water show at the end and that’s about it I think.
Sorry about the shortness of this post. There’s not all that much to write about I think. I mainly write about the landscape and that sort of stuff but the landscape has remained relatively the same since my last entry. We don’t really go into the towns and walk around the towns so it’s hard to write my opinion on them because I really don’t have one most of the time. A lot of the towns do smell really bad though. I don’t know why but when we drive through or by a town there’s always this really bad smell. The people here are friendly and kind but I miss the cool, moist mountains from Colombia; I’m not really all that big on dry and hot areas.
Good bye.

sorrow – The Blue Van – Overland Travels

Manjar

Lima and whatnot