Maté de la Felicidad

I've been eating in Restaurante Granja Heidi now for a few years and always have their house maté (infusion) which is made to their own secret recipe. It consists of seven different herbs and you can have honey added, if such is your desire, but not mine as it makes it all too sweet. It's a delicious maté and better for me than chicha morada, which, though also delicious, has lots of sugar added.

Anyway, the point of all this, is that the restaurant owner insists on keeping the ingredients a family secret. He has had botanists coming from all over the world but none have been able to identify all of the herbs, which he says are not uncommon, which I guess must be the case as he would not be able to find enough if they were truly unusual.

He tells me that South America's most famous botanist (Argentinian I think he said) has identified most but not all of them. The poor man must be in some state. He will go to his death bed wondering. I had been hoping to write on my blog what it was made of, but as you can see this is not going to be possible. So we will all just have to wonder, bit like the coca cola family, don't you think.

I was in La Bondiet cafe last night awaiting my pal's arrival. So decided to try their fresh fruit salad (ensalada de fruta), which was absolutely enormous. It consists of nine different fruits and comes in this huge bowl along with a little jug of yogurt and a bowl of granola. Because it was fruit I decided it would do no harm, but of course fruit has lots of natural sugar, so when I got home my sugar level had gone through the roof and remains so this evening. What to do?

Today I got chatting to a lovely young woman, Lorraine, from California. We were photographing the same building, except she was doing it from a professional point of view as she is an architect and designs hotels, and she's working on one now in Cusco. We had a nice wee chat about the state of the world and went our ways. She's off to do the Inca Trail. A credit to her country I thought.

Finally for tonight I thought you should know that the street I live in here is named after Peru's greatest cyclist, Ramon Zavaleta. All I can find out about him is that he took part in the men's road race at LA Olympics in 1984, but didn't manage to finish the course. So not quite up to the standards of our own Sir Chris, though I am told on good authority that he did win some important races in South America.