Finding Comfort in Camelids

It is probably safe to say that I was one of the few Americans who found solace after the 9/11 attacks by surrounding myself with camelids. I was living in Peru at the time and feeling very depressed and worried and far from family. I had heard there was a camelid fair that had just opened near Lima's seaside. Camelids, for those who are new to the term, are related to camels and, in the case of South America, include alpacas, llamas, vicunas, and guanacos (for a great example of what to do with an alpaca if you happen across one, visit http://northstaralpacas.etsy.com). I thought it would take my mind off the terrible tragedy America had just suffered, so I packed my camera gear in a fanny pack and went.....only to find that it didn't open until the afternoon, several hours off. Perhaps because I looked so woebegone, the guard took pity on me and let me in. Except for hundreds of wonderful camelid specimens, and a few herders and breeders, I had the place to myself.

There were llamas, with liquid eyes fringed by long eyelashes, long necks and erect ears, and their wonderful combination of immensely dignified bearing and silly expressions. I began to feel better, as it is impossible to remain sad around llamas. There were adorable alpacas as well, with their fluffy mantles and utterly cute faces, in a variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, all looking very huggable. There were a few vicuna, delicate wild creatures whose wool is said to be worth more by weight than gold, wool so soft and fine and tempting that they are perennially poached in the Peruvian altiplano, despite government efforts to protect them. And there were guanaco as well who, unlike their cousins, the alpaca and llama, were never tamed by the Inca or Spaniards.

After some time spent at this fair, I'm sure my expression gradually changed from sadness to amusement to bliss, which is a difficult feeling to avoid when surrounded by several hundred camelids. As I was nearing the end of the fairgrounds, I heard the sound of jingling and tinkling, and looked up to see some llamas dressed in their finest, rivalling their camel cousins in the Arabian deserts in festooned glory. Leading them was a llama herder, a man with a wild and distant look in his eyes, who was dressed from head to toe in clothes made of llama and alpaca wool, utterly oblivious of the hot sun heralding the beginnng of the Peruvian summer, or camera-toting foreigners. He had eyes only for his llamas. A breeder standing nearby told me that the llama herder had come down from the altiplano with his flock. I had travelled quite a bit through Peru's high mountains plateaus, and had noticed the occasional speckling of llama herds in the far off distance, surrounded by hundreds of miles of emptiness, where they would be herded into little corrals at night to protect them from attack by puma. Therefore, I understood, I thought, the look in this man's eyes. To spend one's life protecting these animals, sleeping with them for warmth, with little or no human contact for weeks, perhaps months, would be enough to drive anyone wild. And to think that, in the dead of night, with no sounds to break the immense stillness, the llamas would start to hum......for llamas do indeed hum.

Shopping in Lima

Most foreigners hate Lima. It is huge, crowded, and dangerous. The traffic is horrendous. The hills surrounding the city look like accumulations of vacuum cleaner dust. The sea is polluted. The winter consists of the "garua", a low-lying layer of clouds that spits and drools, trapping the smell of fish meal being produced in the seaside factories. What is there to like, they wonder, and scamper off for the greener pastures of Cusco and Machu Picchu, places filled with things tourists like.

What they miss are the hidden treasures. For me, Lima has more hidden treasures than any city I've lived in. I was lucky when I lived there to have a dear friend who, if anything, was even more ready and willing than I to hop in the car and drive to areas that even most inhabitants of Lima avoided. The two of us, equipped with determination and a sense of adventure, and shorn of purses, jewelry, and any other temptations, would dive into the city as if it were a sea and we were scuba divers in search of treasure. We invariably found it.

One of our favorite places to go was the wholesale flower market on the decidedly "wrong" side of town, near the colonial-era bullring and surrounded by impoverished shanty towns. We would drive there, leave our car in the care of some trustworthy -- we hoped -- individual eager to make some spare change, and enter another world, illuminated by rays of sunlight entering through holes in the roof high overhead. Row after row of cut flowers, of every variety and color one could want, heaps, and stacks, and mountains of flowers, watched over by women in traditional Peruvian dress. Men would wander through bearing baskets full of figs so ripe they oozed their honey, or home-made tools used to strip rose stems of their thorns. We would buy enough flowers to fill the car -- roses, sunflowers, freesias, peonies -- and laugh in wonder at how little we spent. My favorite memory of that market was a day when a minstrel group appeared with their ancient instruments, singing songs of beautiful flowers, and lovely women...

The food markets were marvelous as well. My favorite one had beautifully stacked displays of vegetables of an amazing variety. Four different colors and shapes of eggplants; more varieties of raddichio than I saw in four years in Sicily; purple beans; sacks filled with fresh artichoke hearts in acidulated water, strange Japanese and Chinese tubers and vegetables. One could also find small bodegas, or neighborhood grocers, that were filled with wonders from around the world. One day, browsing, I came across some strange-looking objects, looking like large brown fava bean pods covered in wax. Abudurajo, they were called. Could they be? I wondered. And they were! Bottarga, or pressed dried fish roe, which I'd grown to love in Sicily, grated over pasta or thinly sliced on toasted bread, a product one could find in the U.S. only at specialty markets at an exorbitant cost. Lima's position on the coast, near the Humboldt current and its famed schools of fish, her immigrants who came from every corner of the world, the geography that enfolds and supports infinite microclimates....all these elements lead to one of the richest cuisines in the world.

Handicrafts were another wonderful source of endless delight and discovery. There were the markets, of course, known as the "Indian" or "Incan" markets, filled with ceramics and textiles and mirrors and paintings and all manner of lovely things at good prices. Even better than the markets, though, and hidden off the tourist beat, were the little "talleres" that surrounded the city, mostly in the shanty towns clinging precariously to the dusty mountainsides. During the terrible years when terrorism had its claws in Peru, many people fled the killings in their home villages. Many of these villages were in the Ayacucho region, which happened to be one of the richest regions in terms of ceramic crafts. After arriving in Lima, the craftsmen set up shop and continued to practice the crafts and traditions passed down through the generations. Those with determination could uncover these treasures.

One day, stuck in a horrendous traffic jam in an old part of Lima, I happened to look over at a small building nearby. The front door was open in the heat of summer and inside, illuminated by a skylight, I saw an old man applying gold leaf to an elaborately carved frame. With a sense of adventure and with eyes wide open, one finds hidden treasures in the most unlikely places!

Stay tuned for more: bead shopping and the famed fabric district!