Cultural Delicacies: Guinea pig

by Brenda Yun on

I had a guinea pig as a pet when I was in elementary school. His name was Guinea (I know, really original). He was brown with a little splash of white on his chest. He had a cute pink nose. He was kind of a nibbler (he would often bite me with his two sharp teeth), and whatever he put in his mouth came out the other end. I guess it comes as no surprise, then, that I had to change Guinea’s cage frequently. What I didn’t realize in his very short life was that he froze to death. I didn’t know it then, but I had put Guinea’s cage right under the air conditioner. He died of pneumonia, and I spent a whole afternoon in bed holding my dead guinea pig, feeling like I had wronged the poor thing. I had been a very irresponsible pet owner.

As is the case with other household pets (like fish, dog, and turtle), guinea pigs (or “cuy,” in Spanish) are cultural delicacies in some parts of the world. Although I couldn’t bear to order it last year in Ecuador, “cuy” is a pretty common item on traditional restaurant menus.

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I am a vegetarian cook, so the thought of killing and roasting a small guinea pig sounds awfully unappetizing to me. Even more baffling to me is how anyone could find the little meat on a guinea pig worth eating or even the slightest bit delectable. According to Wikipedia, it tastes like rabbit or dark chicken meat.

“Cuy” can be fried, roasted, broiled, or served in soup. It is commonly found in the Andean highlands of Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru, as indigenous tribes in the area would cook them for ceremonial purposes. Peruvians consume over 50 million guinea pigs a year. If that number doesn’t surprise you, then this fun fact will: the past two decades have seen a rise in guinea pig exporting from South America to the U.S., Europe, and even parts of Asia. To be certain, it has become more acceptable to eat guinea pig as a common meal. Some restaurants in New York City now serve “cuy asado” and hang them in the window like Peking duck in Chinatown.

I don’t think we have to worry yet about locking up our pet guinea pigs for fear of someone killing and eating them, but I know my little Guinea is rolling in his grave in pet heaven thinking about how his life could have ended.

Amazing Race 13, episode 3: La Paz, Bolivia, where a taxi can make or break you

by Jamie Rhein on

The competition is heating up on the Amazing Race. Season13 has hit its stride. When the teams landed in La Paz, Bolivia, each team sped or wobbled along depending upon their ability to deal with the altitude.

Although most teams seem to be trying to win the race by just doing their best without creating drama between them, Starr has decided she doesn’t like Kelly and Christy and is out to do them in. The divorcees aren’t too thrilled with her either. I think it’s because the three of them all look alike.

Although, perhaps Starr really didn’t push Christy’s sports bra off a window ledge. Perhaps, she did. Whatever. The sports bra incident created drama that darted in and out this episode. Whenever the focus was off these three vixens, I was a happier viewer and enjoyed the other people’s company.

Travel Tips from this episode:

  • When traveling at a high altitude, breathe deeply, not quickly.
  • Keeping your mood light and being friendly can entice local people to help you out.
  • Walk in La Paz when the distance you want to go is not that far. It’s faster.
  • Read directions carefully. It can save you a lot of trouble and heartache.
  • If the person you are with is having a hard time breathing, be supportive and don’t bitch. You’ll have a better time and your traveling companion won’t talk badly about you.

Recap and Cultural Highlights:

The initial shots of La Paz were magnificent. The blue skies and mountains showed off the beauty of the city’s surroundings. Once the teams landed they were in the dark, literally and figuratively. All headed to the statue of Simon Bolivar for their next clue. The right after midnight departure time was more to my liking than last week’s 4 a.m. start.

Because the clue wouldn’t come until daylight, each person was handed a wonderful Bolivian blanket from a female vendor wearing a signature Cholita hat. The blankets helped pad the hard sidewalk where the team members staked out a space for a bit of shut eye before the morning newspaper arrived. In its pages was the next clue.

During this segment, I wondered what the Bolivians thought of this rag tag group of Americans sleeping on the plaza as if they were homeless.

As soon as the newspapers arrived, there was a flurry and group pounce to snag one. As normal, some of the teams immediately spotted the ad that directed them to their next destination. Southern Belles Marissa and Brooke were not in this group and appeared more and more worried as they were left behind, still searching.

The ad, specific to the race, directed the teams to Narvaez Hat Shop near Plaza Murillo. There they were to buy a cholita hat to take along with them. The blankets were left behind.

I would have had a hard time leaving such a souvenir, but oh, well for the chance of a million dollars, there’s more blankets where they came from.

The next leg of the race was a lesson in transportation woes. Teams that walked got to the shop faster than those that took a taxi. Keep that in mind if you’re in La Paz.. Taxis are not always the fastest way to travel. Ask a local what he or she would recommend. Knowing Spanish helped.

At the hat shop, the teams received the next clues with the Road Block choices: “Musical March” or “Bumpy Ride.” In Musical March, the teams were to walk between two plazas to gather musicians at each location in order to form a band with a range of instruments.

In Bumpy Ride, teams were to walk to Mercado de las Brujas, pick up locally made bicycles made almost entirely of wood–including wheels, one for each person, and ride them down the hills of the cobblestone streets and through a tunnel to the next clue.

Each of the tasks ended at Plaza Abaroa. With these two tasks, the action picked up, and it became clear how the teams’ different choices and the ability to deal with Bolivia’s altitude could influence their outcome.

Mark & Bill, who normally do so well with written information, didn’t read their clue carefully enough and missed the edict that they were to head to the bicycles on foot. As soon as they hopped in a taxi, pleased as punch with themselves, I felt bad. I like these two.

Sarah and Terrence also hopped in a taxi but, immediately felt that something was wrong. They reread their clue, noticed their mistake, and went back to the hat shop location to hoof it. This pair, a focal point of last week, were having smooth sailing except for the snafu with the taxi so they didn’t have much camera time. Maybe Terrence has stopped whining.

Only two teams picked the Musical March. Marissa and Brooke loved the experience, laughing and clapping the whole way. Again, these two seem unflappable. Their band played a fairly lively tune keeping up the pace.

In contrast, frat boys Andrew & Dan were morose. It wasn’t like they were on a death march exactly, but their lack of fun didn’t encourage the band members to step it up much. Their band plodded along the streets, playing their instruments in a tired sort of way, perhaps wondering how they got stuck with such complainers.

The bicycle riders had a more challenging time of it. The best parts were the funky hats and gloves the team members put on for protection. They were similar to what I imagine the Bird Man of Alcatraz might like to wear.

Here, two distinct team personalities emerged. Those who bitched at each other, and those who helped each other out. Ty was annoyed at Aja because she wasn’t quite fast enough for him and Dallas began to get annoyed with his mom for being slow until she reminded him she wasn’t going slow on purpose. The altitude can be a real downer. Aja woefully said that she hadn’t seen this part of Ty’s competitive side before.

The bicycles weren’t a match for the cobblestones and there were a couple of nasty spills. About the time Christy took a fall, Starr hoped that Ty and Aja would U-Turn the divorcees. All decided there wasn’t a point of U-turns quite yet, although Aja was happy to tell Christy later that Starr was out to get her. I’m thinking that they’ve been watching Survivor and are missing out on the fun of Bolivia. Also, it would have been in poor form, I think, to U-Turn someone who is lying on the sidewalk and probably skinned a bit.

Once the teams reached Plaza Abaroa, off they headed, this time by taxi to Los Titanes del Ring where one of the team members learned to wrestle cholita-style. I loved this part. First though, the taxi ride there was a stress producer. Depending on bum luck, some teams were stuck, barely moving, while others had drivers who found more direct ways. Poor Mark & Bill, still unaware of their earlier mistake, were in a taxi that needed to stop for gas.

Donning traditional wrestling suits, after handing a cholita wrestler the bowler hat, each member learned a wresting routine with six moves. Each move had to be done correctly and in the wrestling ring with a real cholita in front of a real audience. If a mistake was made, back to training before being able to try again.

These are the types of tasks I like the best. They highlight part of the culture with depth and give the contestants a chance to interact with people in a more authentic way. I’m sure the Bolivians who were part of this segment are still talking about it.

Although Ken took to wrestling a woman like a pro, his cape flashing as he slingshot himself off the ropes, landed on his back, flipped over the woman he was wrestling, landed on top of her, and eventually raised his arms and hands above his head in triumph, poor Mark had a time of it. Eventually, the hard work did Mark in for awhile. After screwing up the routine twice, he had to breathe in oxygen from a tank before his third attempt. Luckily, third time was a charm.

At this point, I’m enjoying Tina, Marissa, Bill and Toni the best. As spectators of the cholita wrestling matches, they’re enjoying everyone else’s experience as much as they are enjoying their own–a real bonus when it comes to being the perfect traveling companions.

Because Tina & Ken once again kicked it to the finish first. As they stepped on the Pit Stop mat at el Mirador del Monticulo, a park with a view of La Paz, they hugged and kissed as if all is forgiven in their troubled marriage. Maybe the trick to doing well in the Amazing Race is to have a personal history to work through.

The saddest moment in this segment was when Mark & Bill arrived at the Pit Stop to find out that they had a 30 minute penalty because they took a taxi way back when they should have walked. Because they came in 8th, it wasn’t hard for Christy and Kelly to show up before the 30 minutes were up. To Christy and Kelly’s credit, although they were thrilled to find out they were still in the race, they did look dismayed that their win was because of Mark & Bill’s loss.

What Ken & Tina won:

A seven day trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.

Word of travel wisdom from Bill & Mark:

When your traveling, pick a person who you enjoy. As Mark said, “Bill’s one of my best friends. I couldn’t have picked a better person.

Bodyslammed in Bolivia – the female wrestlers of El Alto

by Jeremy Kressmann on

Our friends over at Intelligent Travel pointed us to this awesome video slideshow feature on female wrestling in Bolivia, put together by the team at National Geographic. Lucha libre, for those who are not familiar, is a style of pro-wrestling popular in Latin America. Its popularity extends all the way to South America, where in Bolivia, a feisty group of women have adopted the sport as their own to show their toughness, demonstrate their passion for lucha libre and just simply to let off a little steam.

Called cholitas luchadoras, these wrestling women are typically Aymara, one of the main ethnic groups of Bolivia. Taking stage names like the “Amorous Yolanda” and the “Evil Claudina,” the women take to the stage in the town of El Alto each Saturday night, dressed in their full traditional regalia of petticoats, bowler hats and braided hair. These girls don’t play nice either – attendees can expect to see all the bone-crunching body slams, flying leaps and folding chair weapons they have come to expect from their male counterparts.

It was only 7 years ago that Bolivian entrepreneur and diehard lucha libre fan Juan Mamani had the idea to introduce women into his weekly wrestling events. Attendance was dwindling and Mamani wanted to find a way to bring a new audience to the shows. Several years on and the women have become one of the event’s most popular draws. More interesting perhaps, is that many men come not to gawk at the “pretty ladies” but seem to genuinely admire them for their skill and passion for the sport.

I can’t say that I’ve ever been much of a fan of wrestling, but these women might have won me over. Anybody up for some lucha libre on their next South America trip?

Great American Road Trip: Travel books for the road. 1 of 4: Sun After Dark

by Jamie Rhein on

I’m one of those people who haul books when I travel. I am ambitious, imagining hours of page turning. Usually, though, I barely crack a book. One advantage of riding in a car across a good portion of the United States, as I have recently experienced on my family’s road trip to Montana, is the hours for reading.

There are miles and miles and miles between Ohio and Montana, particularly if you head north to take in North Dakota.

On the way back, Iowa can feel endless. Indiana–dreadful. (Not to put down those lovely states, but at the end of a trip, even with stops, they seem bigger than they are.) As wonderful as scenery is, a book helps move the pavement along, particularly if the book is written by a person who is also on a journey. I brought four such books on my cross-country jaunt and recommend each of them. In the next three days, I’ll be posting on each one.

Here is the first one. I read this one through Minnesota and North Dakota.

Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign—Pico Iyer

An excerpt: “We travel most, I mean to say, when we stumble, and we stumble most when we come to a place of poverty and need (like Haiti, perhaps, or Cambodia): and what we find in such confounding places, often, is that it is the sadness that makes the sunshine more involving or, as often, that it is the spirit and optimism of the place that make the difficulties more haunting.”

Pico Iyer is one of my favorite travel writers and this book of essays does not disappoint. As he explains in the first essay, “The Place Across the Mountains,” the book is a result of his desire to travel to some of the poorest corners in the world in order to shed light on their importance and as well as add to the understanding about what poverty means.

Lest you think that this is a depressing missive that will leave you weeping over your backpack or pull-behind suitcase, chastising yourself for the delight you feel about your own travels when parts of the world have such problems, this is not the case. Iyer’s lyric quality is luminous in its prose and if nothing else, gives the awareness to the reader that hope prevails.

Sun After Dark makes a worthy book for the road because each essay is a stand alone piece. This means that if you put it down for a few days, you won’t feel lost when you pick it up again. The culmination of the essays as a group offers a variety of Iyer’s experiences that range from the fantastic to the simple.

It’s also a good book to share. Once on our trip, my husband didn’t have the books he was reading with him. I handed him this one because he could read an essay or two and it wouldn’t interrupt the flow of the other books he wanted to finish before embarking on another one.

One of the sections that hit a high mark on the unusual travel experiences spectrum is Iyer’s account of his visit to a Bolivian prison. Since Iyer had seen all that he had set out to see, more or less, the prison was at the tail end of his trip. This was one of those ideas that after wards makes one think, “What was I thinking?”

Also enjoyable are Iyer’s in depth accounts of his visit with the Dalai Lama and his time at the same Zen retreat center as Leonard Cohen. Along with the descriptions of the settings are insights into the workings of these men and Iyer’s own musings about how he fits into the scheme of existence.

As usual, no matter where Iyer goes, he sees the wonder and the beauty of humanity, even in those places that are troubling. This is a book to read if you like to think about where you are traveling, as well as, the mysteries and nuances of life.

Bolivia’s “Highway of Death” kills US mountain biker

by Iva Skoch on

A thrilling ride down the “Camino de la Muerte,” or “Death Road,” has become a popular adventure destination in Bolivia. I, personally, get nauseous just looking at the photo.

A 56-year old U.S. tourist, Kenneth Mitchell, was killed here in mountain-biking accident after tumbling from his rented bicycle and falling down a 200-foot cliff. Mitchell is the 12th cyclist to die on the road in the last decade.

The highway east from La Paz, the world’s highest capital city, winds dramatically down the face of the Andes, dropping 11,800 feet in just 40 miles. According to IHT, the narrow dirt track earned its nickname for the frequency with which Bolivian buses would plunge off its 3,300-foot cliffs, killing hundreds a year until a new paved highway opened 2007.

The cause of the accident is unknown. Mitchell’s bike, left behind at the cliff’s edge, was in perfect working order. Strange.