Boil a bunch of potatoes. Peru has about 6 million types of potatoes, and apparently everyone has their own personal preference of what to use for papa rellena. I think in America you would just use a mix of yellow and white. After boiling the potatoes you have to peel them right away before they cool off. This is a very painful process. Next you puree them. In Peru, I guess they don't use potato mashers. Instead, they use a contraption that's kind of like a giant garlic presser. You put about 2 or 3 potatoes in, then squeeze it until the potatoes start oozing out of the little holes. Or start shooting across the room and splattering everyone else in the kitchen. This process is very difficult and tiring, but makes the potatoes nice and fluffy. To a huge bowl of potatoes, add some salt and pepper to taste, and an egg yolk or two. Then mash it all together with your hands. You have to really knead it so that the potatoes start to get sticky so that you'll be able to form them. I think you're supposed to add a little flour, too at this point.
At this point you start to make the filling. Put some oil in a frying pan and sautee a couple cloves of garlic and an onion. Then add some ground beef and brown it. You can also add ají, which is a pepper sauce of which there are many varieties and that they put on everything here.
Time to mold the papa rellena. Cover your hands in flour and then mold a little potato pancake in your hand. Spoon in some of the meat stuffing, a piece of hardboiled egg, and an olive. Then, carefully wrap the potato around the stuffing into a nice little ball. If you fail miserably at this at first, don't be discouraged, it gets easier.
After eating our papa rellena, Nichole and I headed to the Cruz del Sur station to take the bus to Nazca. Best bus ride ever. It was practically empty, so I got 2 comfy seats to myself, we watched a decent movie, and they actually served a delicious dinner - zucchini and eggplant vegetarian lasagna, a cheesy pastry, and an apple tart for dessert. However, it did take about 2 hours longer than expected.
When we got to Nazca, Alas Peruanas, the flight company that we booked for our tour of the Nazca Lines, picked us up from the bus station, took us to their office so we could get everything paid and ready to go for our tour the next morning, and then took us to our hostel, the Hostal Brabant.
It was pretty simple, but definitely nice enough. It had a good TV, so we watched a show about autopsies, then headed a couple of blocks down to the Plaza de Armas to grab some dinner. We ended up getting some pizza and then headed back to the hotel.
We watched a couple episodes of American Horror Story. Has anyone seen this?? It's crazy and messed up and I'm pretty sure whoever writes it is on 18 types of drugs, but I'm also kind of hooked on it now.
Sunday morning we got picked up at the hotel at 7 and driven to the airport. The airport is pretty much a little open air bamboo building and also the most pleasant airport I've ever been in. We ended up having to wait about an hour before our flight. We got paired with a couple German dudes.
The Nazca Lines are huge lines made into shapes only visible from up in the air, that were left by the Nazca culture about 2000 years ago. Most of them are geometrical, but there are also shapes of animals. They're believed to have some kind of astrological connection, or may have to do with the worship of water sources.
The flight was really cool, but also a little nauseating. They would turn the plane sideways to let one side see, then turn it the other way for the other side. That part wasn't really what got me as much as the bumpiness of the little plane when we were just flying straight. We saw 12 of the shapes: the astronaut, the condor, the hummingbird, the hands, the tree, the parrot, the monkey, the whale, the spider, and a few more that I'm forgetting. Luckily, it was only a 1/2 hour flight, because about 2 minutes before we landed, I was on the edge of needing to use the little plastic bag.
After the flight we got taken to a little workshop where they replicate pottery using the methods used by the Nazca culture. The guy gave us a demonstration of how they do it and then let us shop around.
After we checked out of our hotel we grabbed some lunch and then got on a bus to Ica. When we got there we went to Huacachina and walked around a little bit, then found a taxi driver to take us to the vineyards. The first one we went to was kind of a letdown. They're wines and piscos weren't great, and the lady who gave us the tour spoke pretty much incomprehensible Spanish. I don't know if she had a speech impediment or what but I was not gettin it.
We still had some extra time so we went to El Catador. Nichole had been there the last time we went to Ica, so she knew it was a nice one. The guy there was much more comprehensible and the booze tasted better, too. We tried a couple wines. The first one is a wine and pisco mix, which was super sweet and wasn't my favorite, but the second one was delicious. (And only $8 a bottle, so I bought 2). Then we tried some of the creams: peach cream pisco, and another cream that kind of tasted gingerbready. Then time for the straight pisco. I'm not a huge pisco fan, but the guy said he invented a new way to drink it, which is to mix a spoonful of honey in it and sip it slowly. That was doable for me. It was also citrus pisco, which was his invention, and they're the only ones to make Citron pisco anywhere. After our bellies were feeling nice and warm we took the cab back to the bus station and grabbed a bus back to Lima.
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