For Dan Quayle

There are over 3,000 different types of potato(e) cultivated in Peru. Imagine what Trader Joe's could do with that as a frozen medley.

The Incredible (long) Journey

We´ve had some arduous journey´s on our trip (six buses to a backwoods Honduran brewery featuring fruit beer, the food poisoning Lagos de Montebello expedition and the 12-hour overnight bus to Palenque in Mexico come to mind), but I think we´ve set a new personal record for complexity.

FromVilcabamba, Ecuador to Chachapoyas, Peru we managed to take 1 bus, two combivans, three colectivo taxis, two colectivo pick-ups, three tuk-tuks, 1 taxi,and 1 long walk across a bridge at the border.

We managed to breakfast on fried pig knuckles with yucca, and have a dinner that we thought was pork ribs but turned out to be chicken, covered countless miles on the wrong side of pot-holed, speed-bumped dirt roads, and saw spectacular scenery from soaring mountains to desert valleys to jungly hills to beautiful sunsets peaking through storm clouds over the Andes. Was it worth it? Definitely. Would we do it again? Not in a million years.

It´s What´s for Dinner

North American pet store meets South American meat market?

Guinea Pigs were one of the first domesticated animals in the Americas... Not so that every second-grade class could have a mascot, but for its tasty meat with a side dish of potatoes.

We have yet to try this delicacy, but stay tuned for those photos which promise to be a lot less furry and cute.

For Justin

Our fantastic friend Justin prepared us for this trip by writing travel guides based on his trips to South America and Mexico (you can see his photos here: http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/~justin/SA/). While this information has come in handy a time or two, if we overlook one of Justin´s recommendations, he gets testy and starts citing himself, saying things like "I wrote about this in your guide. See Rubinstein, Ecuador, pp. 2." Truth.

Luckily for us, Justin clued us in to an oversight we had made in almost skipping Shantas Pizzeria in Vilcabamba, Ecuador. We headed over and tried the recommended "Licor de Serpiente" and our liver´s haven´t been the same since. It´s a very concentrated licor that has a fermented coral snake in the bottle. Hurrah to the guides that keep on giving.

Where the Ladies at?

So of course it would be in the seventies that we had the bright idea of putting a real woman on our currency. I mean we´d done ¨Liberty¨ and ¨Peace¨and other abstract concepts, but women´s lib called for real women, which led to the Susan B Anthony Dollar. Train wreck. It looked like a quarter and felt like a quarter, but no one likes a dollar that they spend like a quarter.

Around rolls the 21st century, and the GAO is making noise that replacing all $1 bills with coins would save the US Govt. around $500 million a year(almost enough money to finance two days of the Iraq war). So, in a cost saving measure that also gave meaningless symbolic gestures to historically oppressed groups (women and indigenous folk), the Sacagawea dollar was introduced.

A lot of fanfare, but what was the last time you saw a Sacagawea? See it wasn´t just that Susie B sucked as a currency, we, as Americans, hate change. Change is the crap that litters the floors of our cars, change is the stuff we pay for laundry and parking meters with. Change is not real money. Well, except when we clean out our cars every six months and take all that change to the bank, where it miraculously turns into real money. A dollar is still real money. At least to poor folk like us it is, those of you in SF may not agree. And real money is not to be thrown on the floor of the car.

So, where have all these coins that were going to save us millions of dollars in printing costs gone?

Ecuador.

Actually, the Sacagawea coin seems to be the primary source of liquidity in the Ecuadorean market place. Anything bigger is impossible to get change for, and anything smaller is still the crap that litters your car.

So here´s to Sacagawea for keeping the Ecuadorean economy afloat nearly 500 years after white men first set foot on Ecuadorian soil and changed the indigenous power structure forever.

Deep in the Jungles of Ecuador

There are butterflies with translucent wings. Amazing, huh?