As I was walking up the winding trail to the Sun Gate at Machu Picchu, several thoughts were percolating at about the same time. Foremost, when was the last time I suffered a heat stroke? I foolishly went to this Lost City of the Incas without a water bottle. Fortunately, two of my great colleagues brought an extra bottle, and I had drunk half of it with my lunch... which they had also graciously provided. This reminded me of an age old wilderness survival question. If you are asked how important a cooking pot is while stranded in the Arctic, never underestimate the importance of being able to boil snow (quick shout out to Ken on this one).
I also recalled the fantastic week that I had spent in the Sacred Valley region of Peru. Working with a group of ambitious, adventurous, and benevolent staff, medical students, and their relatives at a clinic in the small, rural town of Lamay is an experience that I will always remember. Also, the hospitality and service shown to us by the staff and manager, Edwin González Muñiz, at our hotel, the LaQuinta Eco-Hotel, was second to none. I kept on thinking that filling a bottle with the chilled, luscious agua from the water cooler in our dining hall might have prevented some heat exhaustion.
After walking for 40 minutes up the trail in the late day sun, my thoughts started turning towards the meals I had in Urubamba, the town we stayed at while in Peru. The name Urubamba is a Spanish alteration from a Quechua word for good farmland, not flat land of spiders as noted on Wikipedia, yet another reason not to trust everything off of there.
And without further ado, my mind started thinking of Urubamba’s finest meats and cheeses. This wasn’t an exaggeration by the way, since the best way to find vegetables in their diet was on a veggie deluxe pizza (more on this later). Otherwise, this land seemed to be raised on your typical meat and potatoes diet.
Dateline: 29/6/09, a Monday… yes, in my delirious state, I started utilizing the non-American way of dating. After spending 8 hours in an airplane and 8 hours on lay-over in Atlanta and Lima, it was time to head into town for some authentic food. Our first stop was a quaint restaurant called Sol de Mayo off of the Pintacha Square. Our group of fourteen commandeered a table on the second floor and after perusing the menu, I knew I was ready for a cultural gustatory delight. A multitude of parrilladas (BBQ or roasted meats), including the highly recommended anticucho de corazon were in order. If you know a little Spanish, you know that this involves eating the heart of some animal, a cow in this case. As luck would have it that day, 3 of us wished to try this dish, and only two servings were available. Now you might consider it lucky not having to eat a cow heart, yet the 3rd person would end up ordering cuy. This famous Latin American delicacy involves roasting one of your childhood companions, a guinea pig. While I greatly enjoyed my cow heart which wasn’t quite as tough as I was imagining (and yes you could see remnants of the valves,) I only ate a little cuy which had the consistency of quail.
The next meal I thought of during my state of semi-consciousness occurred on Thursday, 2/7/09… see, this is getting more confusing. This was the third day in a row I had eaten lomo saltado, a Peruvian concoction of beef strips, onions, tomato, vinegar, soy sauce and since we were in Peru, both rice and French fries. I think this dish would do quite well in the US since it covers the two main food groups: meat and potatoes, maybe consider serving it at a football game or in a bar. I think the lomo saltado at our hotel was the best, despite some good competition from two local restaurants. Maybe the beef was a little more tender, the potatoes a little crunchier with more flavors, or the extra onions. I highly recommend anyone in Peru to try this Latin American staple.
I finally reached the Sun Gate after 50 minutes of hiking up a semi-steep incline. I thought to myself that I needed a minimum of 20 minutes of pictures and recuperation to survive the hike back down to the main city. I thought of all the times I should’ve exercised in the last 9 years, but hadn’t. I realized that jogging 5 minutes, 3 times a week wasn’t going to cut it for all day hiking expeditions. I wondered how Federer was going to do in the French Open final.
Speaking of Federer, I could almost taste the pisco sours from the Greenhouse restaurant the previous night, a Friday. Pisco is a Latin American brandy apparently made from grapes which is then mixed with sweet & sour, egg whites, and a dash of lime. This is quite a tasty drink, almost too easy to drink. Apparently, there has been bickering between Peru and Chile over the last 300 years trying to decide the rightful origins of pisco. So how is Federer involved in this? Well, I won a bet on the Federer vs Haas match, thus I enjoyed a pisco sour as the reward. A nice trivia fact is that Federer won the Stefan Edberg Sportsmanship award from 2004 to 2007. Anyway, another nice menu item at the Greenhouse was their varieties of pizzas. The veggie mix pizza has tons of toppings on a paper thin crust. There were also a meat lovers, Hell’s pizza, supreme, double ham and cheese, among many others. The fresh toppings and light crust were a delectable combination, and you could probably eat 3 whole pizzas by yourself easily.
While walking back down the path to Machu Picchu, I asked one of the staff who decided to go on this intrepid march with me if she heard a sound. At first she questioned what I was talking about. A bird? A llama? The wind? Then, she refrained as we both stood still on the trail. And the beating grew louder, louder! Could it be… a VII/VI heart murmur? Surely not, those in the medical field profess, the scale only goes to VI. Then, how could my colleague hear my heart from almost 4 feet away. On a side note, a nice question to ask your cardiology juniors is how high the scale for diastolic murmurs goes. You might be surprised on the percentage that answers correctly.
After taking the bus back to Agua Calientes, the small town at the foot of the mountains nearest Machu Picchu, I enjoyed one of the greatest tasting Gatorades I’d ever had in my life. Nothing beats suffering and deprivation to magnify the taste of a product. Like the double cheeseburger I ate at Wendy’s after being stuck in the rapids of the Guadalupe River in Texas for 12 hours without food. It takes one heck of a burger to beat that one.
Thus, this was the latter part of my trek thru Machu Picchu. For those who haven’t been, I highly recommend it. It definitely deserves to be on the list of 1,000 things to do before you die. Next month’s article will continue my globetrotting to India. Happy eating.
- James Tarbox, MD
