Cuy: Eating the Guinea Pig

To be completely forthright, I knew I was headed to Ecuador where cuy (guinea pig) is considered a treat before I selected the New Year's Resolution. So there was no way I was going to make it through Ecuador without sampling either cuy or gaunta (agouti).
Outside of the food market in Baños, I had my chance.
The Mister and I selected our purveyor of cuy based on three attributes: the meat smelled tantalizing while roasting, the place was packed with locals, and the window listed "cuy con papas" (with potatoes) so we knew we could order a plate meal rather than a whole pig.
It was tasty.
The next day we were at the Saturday market in Riobamba, an extraordinary affair that spills from the permanent food stalls, through blocks and blocks of specialty merchandise (one street all potato sellers, another all things made from used tires), and covering at least three other plazas. At what is the bus station on non-market days, we hit the live animal vendors. One could purchase a chicken at any stage of development, a rabbit literally pulled from a gunny sack, and adorable young guinea pigs. Unlike the bunnies and the chickens, who seemed oblivious to their fate, the guinea pigs all huddled in the corners of the cages, pretending that they couldn't be seen and whimpering in that rodent snort-whimper-squeal sort of way. I'm not totally sure I could have eaten one had I seen the market first.

Oh, yes, it did taste like chicken. Dark meat.

Whose Clues?

Giving tours at Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, we spent a lot of time telling students to look for clues of wildlife, rather than planning to spot a wild animal. This technique served The Mister and me well as we took a guided hike up the valley from Papallacta.
On the hike we saw tapir tracks, wee Andean deer tracks, and a coati skeleton. We flushed a giant guan, ran into some large carnivore scat (there are spectacled bears and a few cats in the forest), and came across a large dead owl.
We crossed primary forest and paramo, watched clouds hide the volcanoes, and delighted in orchids, bromeliads, lupines, fire trees and hypericums.

We did see one live wild mammal on the hike: a Brazilian Rabbit in the hotel courtyard.

South American Sparkling

Prior to our recent trip, different varieties of Argentinian Chandon were the only South American sparkling wines The Mister and I had sampled. We were, therefore, anxious to try more, despite the warnings of Happy Cricket and the Lonely Planet Guide ("Local wines are truly terrible and should not be experimented with,").

At the supermerket In Baños we discovered the Grand Duval line of Ecuadoran sparkling wine. For only $2.80 a bottle (Ecuador is dollarized, so US currency is in use), we could have either the Quinceañera Rosado or the 45th anniversary special. Of course we bought the pink bottle to celebrate a quinceañera. Prairie Dog made of point of commenting that if we ever throw him a quinceañera, we will not be serving that swill. It was very likely the worst sparkling wine we have ever consumed. One might reasonably ask what we would expect of a $2.80 wine that includes water, musto, and raisin concentrate as the first three ingredients drunk at room temperature from a plastic hotel cup, but we've drunk some awful stuff. Being the worst is saying something.

Towards the end of the trip we found a bottle of Chilean sparkling wine at a Spanish Deli in Quito. While it was not as good as many cavas or our house sparkling, the Mister commented that if it were available in the US for $6.95 a bottle, we'd drink the Concha y Toro Brut on occasion.

On our last night in Ecuador, we splurged and ate at Mare Nostrum, a gothic-themed seafood restaurant where the fireplace, stained glass windows and pewter plates actually added to the evening, rather than just looking silly. We drank a bottle of Navarro Correas Extra Brut, an Argentinian sparkling that complimented the perfectly grilled octopus (the best octopus either of us has eaten), as well as the garlicky shellfish, the grilled wahoo and the taxo (a type of passion fruit) ice cream.

Big Animals

We did not encounter any capybaras in the wild, however, as they are the world's largest rodents, I forced the mister to photograph them at the Baños Zoo.We also encountered this tapir with a rather large part wandering freely around the zoo. Had you been in my invertebrate zoology class this last semester you would know that being hung like a tapir is nothing compared to barnacles, whose penises can be eight times as long as the rest of their bodies, or polyclad worms, which stab each other (they're all hermaphroditic) with their two protruding members. See, I did learn something this semester. . .people pay more attention when you throw in sex along with the ecology and books.

The Embarassement of Being Overfed

I've been thinking about food a great deal recently. Of course, thinking about food is not exactly a new pastime: I think I have thought about food a great deal all of my life. However, travel does make me think differently about food, as did the two books I read on the trip, Living Poor by Moritz Thomsen and Her Fork in the Road edited by Lisa Bach.
Thomsen spent four years in the Peace Corp on the coast of Ecuador in the late '60s. His chronicle is well written (Happy Cricket's long ago review points out some of the funnier passages), unintentionally depressing, and food obsessed. He reminds readers of the close relationship between food (particularly protein) and development, particularly intellectual. He finally realizes that his efforts to better the situation in the impoverished village he lives in fail not because of bureaucracy, laziness and cultural differences (which all play a part), but largely because for several months every year there is not enough food to support men working or children's brains developing.
Her Fork in the Road, is much, much different. The book is a collection of essays celebrating women eating and travelling; the kind of book my mother and I eat up. While in Ecuador looking at small people (knowing that most of adult size is nutritionally and not genetically determined) and being fed meat at every meal, I was not as impressed by the essays discussing eating as a passion of the senses as I usually am. I found myself drawn to the essays describing hunger (and Kelly Winters' descripion of hunger on the Appalachian Trail and Dawn Squires' essay about a food-less Solomon Islands feast are both spellbinding).
Overall, I concluded that being overfed is really an embarrassment. By eating too much (and having the resulting body), I am shamelessly flaunting my wealth, working against my environmental principles, and acting irresponsibly with regards to my own health. I should be ashamed.
This did not stop me from buying the local specialty, a layered homemade ice cream bar, as our bus ambled through Salcedo.

Both books, by the way, are highly recommended. I did have the impression reading Her Fork that I had heard a lot of this before. As a reader of MFK Fisher, Ruth Reichl, Elizabeth David, Frances Mayes and Isabel Allende, I had actually read much of it before. I also had the nagging impression that "I could write better." My mother, who believes in food writing and my ability to write more than I do, might have given me the book (twice!) to remind me exactly of that. If food (and plant) writing is my calling, why am I not doing it?

For those of you following along at home

As I jump around talking about books, sparkling wine and cuy (roasted guinea pig), I thought I'd best give some indication of where we actually were on this trip.

Aside from the unintentional night in Guayaquil (largest city in Ecuador, on the coast), we did not venture far from Quito (capital city in a high Andean valley).
Our trip was basically:

1. Mindo (West of Quito towards Santa Domingo de los Colorados), cloud forest eco-tourism village at 1250m
2. Papallacta (East of Quito towards Baeza-- in the Amazon watershed), hot springs in an old volcano crater, surrounded by high Andeas and some cloud forest at 3,300+ m.
3. Tena, bustling city in the Amazon jungle at 518m (quite a bus ride from over 10,000 ft. to under 2,000).
4. Banos (between Puyo and Ambato) tourist town on the "balcony" of a volcano at 1,800m.
5. Riobamba, bustling city surrounded by volcanoes at 2,750 m and at the bottom of the little map.
6. and back to Quito.

Maps provided by the CIA via wikipedia.

Non-Monkey Rodent

The delay in D.C. caused us to cut out our trip with Happy Cricket to the beach. After delays in Miami, several aborted landing runs over Quito and an unexpected night in Guayaquil, we abandoned our plan of visiting Isla de la Plata and seeing the boobies because we just weren't up for a 12 hour bus trip after the airports and airplanes. So we arrived in Quito and headed almost immediately to Mindo (immediately the next day after visiting some churches, an art museum, the botanic gardens, an internet cafe, two bars . . .).

The small town of Mindo sits in the cloud forest

but that didn't stop the children marching down the main road for well over an hour from looking parched and about to pass out. We did not discover the reason for the festivities, but we did pick out a school for Ewaldina (our fictitious future child) if we should live on the Western Andean slopes near the equator.

Our second day in Mindo we went bird watching. It was a fabulous excursion, filled with tanagers, wrens, a helpful tucanette and eleven species of hummingbirds.

While watching the hummingbirds, I became excited by a loud rustling in the trees: a monkey! Or at least my first wild rodent in South America.