Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Evan
p.s. There's no way expoundaries can be a real word, is there?
Saturday, January 21, 2006
this boat has to be bigger than it appears and that the car would be neatly driven 
within the confines of the gunwales of the boat. The notion of putting the car on top of the gunwales didn't even occur to me as a possible course of action until I saw a troop of confident Peruvians attempting just that. After some heaving, pushing, and lifting (not to mention balancing), the car was a-float on a boat, teetering its way across the river. The best part is, on the other side, the bank is steeper, so getting out is
even harder. Basically, the idea was this: Drive the car off the boat into the water. With an idea like that, you can at least admire its straightforwardness and neglect of general physics. So this is what transpired upon the dismount. First, the balance was skewed way to the nose-side, which caused the boat to tip like crazy and thus get thrust back towards the center of the river. By the time the car drove off the boat, it had worked its way back to deeper water, and the angle of plunge was so steep that the car basically did a nosedive into the mud. After some Peruvian brute force, the car was miraculously cast up onto the river bank.
when all the cool stuff started to happen. Apparently, one of the traditions is to construct a dummy, clothe it with your clothes from the past year, and torch it in the middle of the city streets. So basically every street in sight was lined with burning dummies and crazed Peruvians dancing around their effigies. It was around this time that Amanda claimed to have seen a 6 year old drinking beer - other confirmed sightings were 10 year olds driving motorcycles, 70 year old women dancing like they have ants in their pants, etc.Unfortunately I got Ben addicted to cecina during his stay here. Cecina is a dried, smoked, and salted lean pork that is frickin awesome, so shut up. We somehow managed to eat it I think every day that they were here. We went up to the city of Moyobamba for no real reason, but mostly our concern up there was whether or not cecina was available. They did have some sort of dream-like fruit juice called camu-camu which I remember wasn't that good, but for some reason can't stop thinking about. At any rate, there isn't a whole ton of stuff to do in Moyobamba, so we asked around and got word of some hot springs nearby. Promising. Unfortunately it was January 1st, so I think every inhabitant of Moyobamba was looking for something to do. With their options limited, the obvious result was that they all wound up in these 'hot springs'. A one sol entry fee got you into the Peruvian equivalent of a water park, not some pristine hole in the woods we were hoping for. After deciding not to swim in the algae-green pool (which was filled to the gills with people), we checked out the hot springs, which were basically cement pits, containing tepid water, lots of people, and high potential for flesh eating bacteria. Passed. Next day we decided to climb a mountain we dubbed as the 'meatball' for its somewhat bolar stature. I must have touched some crazy plant because I got a rash like crazy and my face swelled up like a tomato for several days. And the hotel we stayed at had a coconut tree with a huge coconut that me and Ben manhandled open despite our lack of coco-tools (i.e. machete). Thus explaining the photograph of a triumphant Ben with a knife in a defeated coconut.
Back in Tarapoto we were faced with extreme heat. Wanted to go swimming, but where? We saw how green Peruvian pools can be. And all the good waterfalls are being used by multitudes of appreciative Peruvians. Then I thought of my huge orange trash can. The idea began to take shape. Fill the trash can with water... get in! Drink a coconut while in the trash can! Its ideas like this that end wars. So we sharpened the machete, plucked some cocos (shirts off of course, island-boy style), and dipped our abdomens in my huge orange bucket.
Last, but not least, we made some chocolate. Thus I present you the Twomey Extra-Gritty Dark. Not to brag, but it was righteous.
-Evan
p.s. Just got a gigantic sack of cacao fruit, more than I wanted (haha yeah right). If anyone is interested in getting a Twomey Extra-Gritty Dark, I might be able to work something out with customs.
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Ok, as promised, and late as usual, a pictorial demonstration on how to make basic chocolate from cacao fruit. So first, you have to find cacao, which is not exactly easy. Anyone wondering where hershey's syrup, tootsie rolls, chocolate guns, etc. get their flavor, its from this big football-looking thing pictured to the left. For some reason, they are not to be found in the Tarapoto market, which is surprising, since they are absolutely delicious raw, not to mention the fact that you can make chocolate from them. So typically one must go into the field
and ask farmers to go collect any cacao they might have. So far I've been able to locate about 30, although I think I've found a good source so I should now die of chocolate poisoning in a relatively short time. With a machete, you must open this fruit up, since the outside is essentially wood and has no culinary value. From there, you get a big hunk of fleshy white seeds which you can do one of two things with, a) chew the flesh off and wallow in their delicious glory (the taste is sort of like apple, lime
, cherry, and chocolate all at once) or b) ferment them with the hopes of making chocolate. For you greedy people out there that want the best of both worlds, I suppose you could suck all the flavor off first then ferment them, but do you really want something that you just had your slobber all over to sit there and fester for 10 days? Better to ferment them
unmolested. The fermentation process is interesting - the seeds go from white to purple/brown and give off odors that range from apple cider to chocolate-vinegar. After about ten days the seeds have likely reached their chocolaty optimum and are ready for drying, which can be done by setting them out in the sun for a couple days. Ok, dried fermented seeds...this is what people want. From here, they are essentially inert and will keep fresh for months, so this is how they are shipped around the world, in 
big sacks from say, Peruvian rainforest to...crazy Belgians that make expensive chocolate. Next comes the roasting, which is the best part, since this is where you basically take flavorless beans and turn them into essentially a big, chocolate nut. Depending on the type of seed, roasting can last anywhere from 5 minutes and up, I have had decent luck at around 20 minutes on low oven heat. Basically when your e
ntire house smells like brownies, the seeds are done and can be cooled down for cracking. This is where the outer shell is removed to expose the 'nibs', which are basically as pure chocolate as you can have. From here, to make smooth bar-chocolate, you need lots of expensive equipment and several days of weird alchemistry, so I have decided to avoid this nuisance and mak
e cowboy chocolate, basically just nibs ground down to a delicious chocolate ooze. Using this awesome $20 contraption I found in the market, one can (with persistence) transform these dry-looking nibs into something that looks more appetizing and chocolatey. Finally, with some powdered sugar and much cranking, eventually you end up with something that has the consistency of frosting and enough theobromine to kill a donkey. Preferred methods of disposal are chocolate milk, outright consumption, or intravenous injection.Monday, December 19, 2005
Evan
Monday, December 05, 2005
Peruvian Food
A healthy fear and disgust of any
Meat – who would have thought that a gringo could eat market meat and live to tell about it? After failed attempts at buying pork at the local supermarket, it was time to look somewhere else. It was surprising that the supermarket had crap pork because it is literally the only place you can find refrigerated meat for sale anywhere around here. Problem is, it seems like they just bought meat and left it in their fridge until all of it was bought, which resulted in rancid junk that even vultures would cringe at. So it was time to get serious about pigs and start looking at the source – you guessed it – the market. By far, the scariest thing in the market is meat. With the help of a local dude (the same guy that was talking all night in Alto Progreso), I was able to locate some pork that had marginally fewer flies on it than the majority. A moment of exposition: the market primarily consists of rows and rows of outdoor tents made of tarps; however, there is a central building that is really the heart of the operation. Walking into this building is like walking directly into a butcher shop, except that it is a) a public exhibition and b) 90 degrees. After the initial desire to vomit on everything in site, the guy showed me where he usually bought his pork – basically it was a big table with assorted pig anatomy strewn about. I requested a kilo of chop (in one full slab), so the dude takes the meat, throws it down on the meat-stump (literally a stump, and an old one at that), and with 2 machete hacks hands me a big hunk of hot pork. 10 soles ($3.50) for a kilo, not bad! The crazy thing is that the pork was extremely delicious, juicy, and most importantly, not rancid like the other stuff.
Ok, I will be heading out into the field Tuesday night for several days in hopes to find a poison frog (Dendrobates dendrophilus) that I think only one person has seen alive before. No pictures exist of living ones yet. There is a good chance that we won’t find it, but I guess the chance of us finding it is a lot lower if we don’t go try.
-EvanSunday, November 20, 2005
A coral snake (Leptomicrurus scutiventris) that we found on the way to Alto Progreso. It was about the size of a night crawler. Coral snakes are related to cobras and are highly venomous, although, small ones such as this would have a very hard time opening their mouth wide enough to bite you. Jason, this must be the one you saw but we couldn't find despite demolishing half the station.
This is the waterfall everyone loved so much. It is nice, although to a Peruvian it is probably more like oasis.
High elevation forest on a cloudy day.Saturday, November 19, 2005
It is a lot easier to write about stuff when you have stuff to write about. I guess you could say that this is the main reason I have been so awful at updating this thing. It has been fairly quiet and uneventful around here. I haven't been scaling any unexplored mountains or riding any jaguars - not yet at least!
Let's see...first I will pose the question: Why do people, and by people I mean Peruvian people, love waterfalls so much? Ok, big waterfalls are pretty sweet, like when the water is falling so far that it just freaks out and turns to rain. But the ones where it is just a river that happens to be flowing off a cliff...granted they are nice and all, but Peruvian people have an abnormal enthusiasm for them. I went up to a small village called Alto Progreso about a week ago with a few people from a local forest conservation NGO. On the way up, we came across a pretty big waterfall. Now don't get me wrong, I like falling water as much as the next guy, but the second Peruvians get anywhere near it the cameras come out like a group of Japanese tourists at the statue of liberty. This point is made clear if you look at any local tourist attraction map. For every town there is a picture of someone (usually a woman in a swimsuit, waving) standing in front of a waterfall, even if the waterfall might only be like 10 feet high. Anyways, after a photo session at waterfall #1, we were on our way to Alto Progreso. There really wasn't much reason to go there, after all, hardly anyone lives there. It is one of these strange villages that basically consist of a school in the middle of the woods. You get there and think 'where the hell does everyone live?' and the answer is, everywhere, all over the place, but nowhere near the school. Alto Progreso is more of a loose affiliation of scattered farms anywhere within a 3-hours walk from the school. We had a small meeting with the town about various forest-things. I have no idea how a town meeting is called, but it must be strange to see 50 people creep out of the woods all at once. We ourselves crept up to a house where we stayed the night. When we sat down to eat, I noticed that the floor was crawling with little guinea pigs, which were all chirping and scuttling around looking for food, oblivious to the fact that their cute existence would soon be ended with a machete splitting their head open. We did not eat cui (guinea pig) that night, although I can say that it is pretty tasty, despite the fact that even a cooked cui looks like it should belong in a coloring book rather than your dinner plate. I will try to get some photos, as they are of some anatomical interest - that is, if you want to know what a deep fried trachea looks like. Later, not having my tent, I slept on the floor to provide the mosquitoes with some much-needed food. Two other guys that came along were sleeping on the floor too, one of which was the governor or something of a local city. Everybody laid down to go to bed at about 9pm, but this guy firmly announced that he had no intention of actually sleeping until at least 11pm, meaning that he did not have any intention of letting anybody sleep until 11, since he talked loudly and without pause up until I started growling like a dog every time he opened his mouth. The next day we were on our way down, although a local farmer had mentioned the existence of another waterfall. At that, everyone's face lit up (except for mine). So after a 1-hour detour, we got to see more water falling off a ledge, although this one was pretty neat in that it formed a large pond at the bottom. I half expected to see a woman in a swimsuit waving to me.
Later that week I went down to the lowland town of
