All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [66]
Finally, the day arrives when I meet Guillermo at the airport and we fly to Lima. We rent a little Jeep and drive to his mother’s house, a formal, immaculate haven in chaotic Lima. I’m glad to be with Guillermo, who knows the city and is so aware of its dangers that he won’t let me get out of the car until he opens the door for me, so he can be by my side.
We begin our mission to eat at restaurants that tell the story of Peru’s history in their dishes, starting with a visit to the restaurant owned by one of Guillermo’s childhood friends who is now Peru’s most famous chef. We try ceviche of wild sea bass with lime and red onions, which tells the tale of people who have long caught fish in the morning and had a taboo against eating it later than lunch. We taste a tiradito, sliced raw bonito, an interpretation of Peru’s nikkei, or second-generation Japanese, cuisine, along with sea urchins on tender ribbons of raw calamari. We have spicy chifa food in a downtown Chinese restaurant. We snack on anticuchos—beef-heart kebabs—from streetside carts. We stuff ourselves with stuffed peppers from Arequipa’s picantería cuisine and with risotto with black scallops that speak of the African-inflected criollo food still served in most homes. We eat roasted guinea pig, albeit an organic one, nestled in a bed of oca ravioli in a pisco pecan sauce. We even try a tough piece of alpaca.
By the time we leave Lima, heading south for Arequipa, we are ill, unable to stomach the thought of food. We can only barely appreciate Arequipa’s gorgeous city-within-a-city, the Convent of Santa Catalina, where wealthy nuns lived lavishly, painting their walls in exquisite colors, decorating with simple but impeccable taste, surrounding themselves with colonial masterpieces. We are only slightly recovered when we drive over high-altitude dirt roads to the Colca Canyon to chase after condors and sit in hot springs. Guillermo, being a Peruvian, with an endless thirst for information about history, geography, and ethnography, is a wonderful companion and guide. One of the good things about not being married is that you can be friends with men whom for whatever reason you aren’t lovers with—in Guillermo’s case, maybe the fact that we have the same birthday makes us astrological siblings, too much alike, but we both agree we are best off being friends, so there has never been any tension. For whatever bad luck I’ve had with men in the romance realm, I can’t overlook, and probably wouldn’t trade, my great fortune in having lasting friendships with wonderful men.
After Guillermo goes home, Evan meets me in Lima with a burst of excited energy. We’ve been planning our Peru adventure almost since the time we started dating a few months before. Evan, an engineer, prepared for our trip meticulously, with geological and topographical maps, a GPS gadget, several guidebooks, and two duffel bags filled with wicking, water-repellant, bug-off layers of clothing for every climate emergency (we’re going from the Amazon to the Andes). He is taking care of all the details, and everything is under control. He printed a spreadsheet listing reservation numbers, transportation times, and contacts, as well as things we should remember to have available in our day packs each day. This is a marked contrast to the way I usually travel or with Guillermo, since we’d prepared only by soliciting restaurant recommendations, casually changing modes from lunch with a count in the oldest home in the Americas (Guillermo is a fortuneless Peruvian aristocrat) to walking around fields, talking to Indians about their crops.
Once organized, Evan is game and easygoing. We fly to a town in the Amazon and take a boat up a steamy river to a jungle exploration center, where we stay in a hut and traipse