Chicha

Perhaps the best thing about this adventure has been the people I've met. Riding an unusual bike into a village off the beaten track you do get some hostile/suspicious stares, but on the other hand it can be a real ice-breaker, and I have been able to socialise with a diversity of people, despite my normal shyness and poor Spanish.

This afternoon, for example, I was a quarter the way up a 1,500 climb, struggling with the steep gradient and the intense Andean sun, when I passed a group of people sitting under the shade of a straw canopy at the front of a mud-brick house just outside Limatambo, and drinking what looked like turbid fruit juice. They invited me to join them and, with my throat as dry as a (insert preferred idiom here), I didn't hesitate. One of the women poured me a glass of the beverage from a large plastic petrol can, explaining that it was chicha, made from fermented maize. It is a drink originating from pre-Colombian times, and it is a daily ritual for many indiginous people to gather in the afternoons to enjoy a few glasses. Of course they waited until my glass was half empty before explaining that the preparation involves someone chewing on the maize (saliva helps the fermentation). There wasn't much I could do except shrug my shoulders, offer a toast, and accept a top-up.

Faced with a choice of continuing the steep ascent, or staying and hanging out with this friendly group drinking chicha, I opted for the latter, hoping I'd be able to find somewhere to stay in the village. A few of them didn't speak Spanish, only Quechua, but the others were able to translate. And my concerns about finding somewhere to stay were short-lived. Within half an hour I'd been offered a room in a finca just outside the village.

(Later I wondered whether the chicha tradition would survive. In Colombia, the government has introduced strict hygiene laws for the production of panela (a sugarcane drink), under pressure from agri-businesses keen to shut down small-scale producers, and now soft drinks like Coca Cola are slowly replacing the tradititional beverage (see http://benjaminball.blogspot.com/2007/06/aguapanela.html).)

However, not all my meetings have turned out so well. Last week in Trujillo I met a couple of guys who said they were from Lima and were in town with their salsa band for a festival. We went for lunch and then to a bar on the outskirts of town, where one of their friends joined us. After a while, one of them asked me if I could exchange some Soles for US dollars for them, as they were continuing on their tour to Ecuador (where the dollar is the official currency), and they couldn't get a good exchange rate at the bank or from local money changers, whereas I, with a foreign ATM card, could withdraw US dollars from a local ATM (and they would even pay my transaction charges). There was no way I was going to go to an ATM with them, and I flatly refused, at this point realising something was amiss.

He subsequently told me he collected foreign banknotes, showing me some from Vietnam and Cambodia, and asking if I had any Australian money. I lied and said no, and showed him instead a Colombian 20,000 Peso note (worth about $10 or 30 Soles) that I've been trying to get rid of. He offered to buy it, but said he only had a 100 Soles ($33) note on him, and so suggested exchanging it for the 20,000 Pesos plus 70 Soles. I again lied and said I only had 40 Soles on me, but he said that I could give him the rest later and handed me the 100 Soles note. I took one look at it and saw that it was a fake.

It was now very obvious that they were trying to scam me by exchanging fake notes. I felt a bit stupid to have spent the previous couple of hours with these guys believing their story, and that they were just interested in my company, but I was quite happy with my riposte: I handed the 100 Soles note back, saying I wasn't sure if it was genuine or not, announced that I had to go and meet some friends, thanked them for the beers (implying that they could pick up the bill), and hurried away. (In retrospect I think they may have seen me coming out of the bank earlier when I'd gone to change some money.)

Incidents like this make me more cautious about opening up to the people, but will not stop me from trying. I guess that in popular tourist towns like Trujillo you are more likely to be targetted and should be more guarded.