The next day, March 7th, we got back on the bus and left Tarma for the open road. There were so many fields on the sides of the super steep mountains that I couldn’t imagine how the people harvested their crop. We learned that we were traveling during the rainy season, which means lots of mudslides occur on the road we were traversing and we saw remnants of past mudslides (boulders and piles of dirt) by the side of the road. We stopped in the town of La Merced for the bathroom and I tried a yummy type of flan they seemed to serve everywhere. On the road from la Merced to Pichanaki we ran into problems.
We were stopped behind a line of cars leading to a bridge where no automobiles were coming or going over it, only people on foot. As it turns out, a truck had tried to go up a ramp onto the bridge and didn’t keep both of his wheels on it so he got stuck with one wheel dangling off the ramp, blocking all traffic whatsoever on the only possible road for our journey. It was quite a fiasco. During our wait I got to try some fruit called anona or something like that. It was pretty big with white flesh and black seeds but its texture and taste reminded me of mango (just not as good). After eating fruit and putzing around for an hour or so we decided to all cross the bridge on foot then take 4 separate cabs to Pichanaki to eat lunch and have the bus drivers meet us in Pichanaki when they got through (which would be God knows when). The cab ride made very clear that the landscape had changed. We were still surrounded by mountains, but it was not the cold crisp air of the rocky mountains of Tarma we were breathing, but the sticky, humid air of lush green mountains covered in jungle. At the restaurant in Pichanaki we tried jungle fare which consisted of fried yucca (a root that tastes kind of like a drier, starchier potato), fried plantains, dried ham, some sort of boar meat (most with pieces hair still on it, ew) river fish both fried and not, and of course, the staple Peruvian salad with lettuce, tomato and avocado all separated and covered in lemon/lime juice and a little bit of salt. I talked a little with the waitress there about differences between English and Spanish and then we were on our way to Setipo, a town in the middle of the jungle.
In Setipo we walked around a little at night before dinner and sat in the park. Every town we visit has a central park with trees and benches where people sell snacks and especially ice cream from little carts. Then we ate at a Chifa, which was terrible, and went back to the hotel where we’d prepared the cake for Kevin’s 21st birthday that Melissa and I surreptitiously obtained in La Merced that day. Even though Kevin was a sicky and hadn’t eaten all day we all surprised him and we all enjoyed some delicious birthday cake together.
