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Lima Day Trip: Birding at La Punta
First, a disclaimer: I know next to nothing about birds, let alone birds in Lima. I can identify cuculis — those fat, grey pigeons that constantly hump in the trees — and hummingbirds and seagulls, which you can spot in various parts of the capital, but other than that, I couldn’t begin to tell you who all those strange-looking birds are that flap around my backyard. All I know is that, like waves of tourists in Peru, some birds appear in the spring, others in the fall, and there are slews of them. Which is why I wasn’t surprised when a local birding expert informed me recently that Peru is a serious…
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Writing on Bullfighting for HuffPo
I’ve been away from An American in Lima for a little while (understatement) but thanks to my friend Levi Novey, aka Mr Green HuffPost, I’m getting a bigtime nudge to return to blogging. Which I do love doing, by the way. Levi let me hijack his column today to guest rant about bullfighting (The Twisted Temptations of Bullfighting in Peru). It’s a confession about the thing I experienced at Acho that I never wrote about before. Call it my testosterone moment in the bullring. The column includes nice photos by El Fotografo, by the way. I only went to the bullfights twice in Lima but I still think about what…
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Confessions of a Redhead in the Callejón: What I Learned at the Bullfights
November 29’s corrida marked the penultimate bullfight of the Señor de los Milagros festival, held in Lima’s historic Plaza de Acho bullring. The last day to see bullfighting in Peru’s capital is December 6, next Sunday. (Ticket information here.) My husband, El Fotografo, and I haven’t gone to any of the corridas this year, and we don’t plan to. EF is grossed out by bullfighting, even though he admits the sport makes for great picture-taking, especially when you have permission to stand inside the callejón, as we did last November. (The callejón is the low-walled alley surrounding the bullring where the toreros enter and exit the sand circle or ruedo. Occasionally a bull will leap or knock over the wooden wall, injuring…
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Writing on Bullfighting for HuffPo
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A Puppy Named Arena
Last month a Weimaraner named La Bruja gave birth to six puppies including Arena (“sand”), above. La Bruja belongs to one of El Fotógrafo’s cousins who lives in Jesus María. We had heard that La Bruja was embarazada but we weren’t keeping track of the due date or even thinking ‘puppies on the way.’ This past Sunday we went to a family almuerzo, and one of the kids brought this little velvet-furred creature in a cardboard box. I was kind of floored. The puppy has a wrinkled old-man face and a fat panza and a tail like that of a chubby rat. Who knew Weimaraner puppies were so tragically cute?
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Argentinean Doctor on Brink of Death after Eating Pickled Vizcacha
Frank Zappa once warned: Don’t eat the yellow snow. The same might be said about the vizcacha, a reclusive member of the South American bunny family that some food experts have recommended as a economical protein source. (See my Feb. ’09 post.) Seems that the experts didn’t realize that improperly prepared vizcacha is an ideal breeding ground for botulism, as one victim in Argentina recently found out. Dr. Francisco Diez, a 45-year-old orthopedic surgeon, was rushed to a hospital in San Rafael in the Cuyo region of Argentina, on October 25, after contracting a local form of botulism, reported Diario Los Andes and other South American news sources. Diez became violently ill after eating vizcacha en escabeche, a traditional Argentinean dish of rodent cooked in oil, onions…
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Day at the Spa
A perk to living in Lima is that you can have your hair cut and styled for ridiculously low prices. A salon down the street from us charges S/.20 to do a full blowout, for any length hair. That’s less than US$7 for something that stylists in the United States charge $50 and up. If they’ll do it at all. (I used to go to a salon in Florida whose owner refused to straighten my long, thick hair, claiming the effort aggravated her carpel tunnel syndrome.) Ditto prices for dog grooming. Lola went to the dog spa today. They bathed her, cut her nails and put a ribbon on her and then drove…
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Of Poisoned Dogs, Pigeons and Fujimori
Many thanks to the concerned people who’ve sent their good wishes to our dog Lola, who was poisoned last week in Parque Leoncio Prado, in Miraflores. Lola recovered thanks to the efforts of her vet, whose office is just blocks away. Not every animal that is poisoned in Peru is fortunate to live close to a competent veterinarian. Many pets die of asphyxiation or shock (Lola was in shock when we took her in) before a remedy can be administered. Four of El Fotografo’s relatives have had dogs or cats die from poisoning or suspected poisoning over the last ten years, and in each case, the animal wasn’t found until too late. Hearing…
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The Sport of Dog Poisoning in Peru
I wish I never had to write this post, but since my Labrador nearly died from ingesting poison in a Lima park this week, I must share what I’ve learned to alert other pet owners. A surprising number of people in Peru like to kill dogs and cats with veneno(poison). Municipalities such as Barranco and Miraflores use highly toxic insecticides in public gardens that routinely poison pets. And poisoning a dog or cat is not a crime in Peru. El Fotografo and El Hijo took Lola to Leoncio Prado park, in Miraflores, to play fetch on Wednesday. They had her running after the ball, something she never tires of, for more…
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Cemetery Dog, Buried City of Yungay, Peru
Dog at Yungay National Cemetery; Mount Huascaran in background (photo by Barbara Drake 2009) Last Sunday, El Fotógrafo, El Híjo and I toured the cemetery above the buried town of Yungay, about 30 miles north of Huaraz. We were with a group of scientists and historians taking part in a glacier adaptation conference, and there couldn’t have been a more stark reminder of nature’s destructive potential than to wander about this picturesque yet oppressive site — a place where nearly 20,000 souls perished in minutes from a massive avalanche that trapped them in mud, ice and rocks on May 31, 1970. Stuart of En Peru explains the catastrophe vividly. We stood on the uppermost tier of…
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Matador David Galan, in Plaza de Acho
Can you say attitude? This Spanish torero fought at Plaza de Acho last November. He was a show stopper who would do anything to please the crowd — even throw off his shoes and kneel in the sand before the bull.
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Tiniest Andean Frog Can Sit on a Dime
Herpetologists have discovered a new species of frog in the Andes cloud forest. Nobel's pygmy frog, as it is called, is so tiny that it can sit on a dime, which makes it the smallest frog in the Andes mountain region.
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Yellow-tailed Woolly Monkey Ready for Its Close-up
A young yellow-tailed woolly monkey plays in the rubbish behind a family’s house in Alto Mayo Valley, Peru / photos c. Shanee-NPC Noga Shanee of the Neotropical Primate Conservation group and Univ. San Marco researcher Fanny Cornejo visited this blog a few days ago to share some facts about the yellow-tailed woolly monkey (Oreonax flavicauda), an extremely rare primate found only in the cloud forests of Peru. As Noga and Fanny have so helpfully pointed out, I ran the wrong photo with my original post about this endangered monkey. Those images were of the common woolly tailed monkey, not the rarer yellow-tailed woolly. Mea culpa. A true yellow-tailed woolly has a white muzzle, as…
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Photo of the Day: Girl with pigeons, Arequipa
Girl feeding pigeons in Plaza de Armas, Arequipa / photo c. Jorge Vera 2008 Arequipa, the White City rimmed by volcanic mountains home to cloistered nuns, virgin sacrifices & this sombre girl in the Plaza de Armas feeding pigeons from her fingertips. — Barbara R. Drake
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Encounters on the Miraflores Malecon
Lola had an eventful morning. El Fotografo and I took her for a long stroll along the Malecón in Miraflores, overlooking the ocean, and in the course of one and a half hours she met: her longlost mother her longlost father author Mario Vargas Llosa. We had been walking for an hour when we ran into Pepa. The eerie thing about Lola’s mother is she looks exactly like Lola — a slim, low-slung black European Lab with a delicately shaped head. EF has spotted Pepa several times by the Malecón lighthouse in the last year, but this was my first time meeting maman since we adopted Lola in late 2007. Pepa was carrying a tennis ball…
