How do you get food to look like that? What kind of camera do you use? Do you use any special lenses?
Go to a big food website and the food glistens, the light is perfect and everything is in its place. But let’s say you are a traveler carrying a pocket or DSLR camera and you have a fascinating, colorful spread before you that you’d like to share with others or capture for your own memories. Conditions are tricky and time is limited.
What to do?
We eat the mountain…and the mountain eats us.
— David, a mine guide and former miner in Potosi, echoes a decades-old sentiment about the city’s lifeblood, its world-famous silver mines.
It was late morning and the sun was bright, the sky crystal at 13,400 feet in Potosi, Bolivia. We were being tended to by a group of schoolgirls dressed as nurses at a hygiene fair; they sought to teach us the methods and benefits of properly washing our hands.
The mood: uplifting and hopeful.
Contrast this with just the day before.
Peruvian cuisine has attained a certain hipness over the last decade. So when we put out a call to our network for Peruvian food suggestions prior to our visit to Lima, we were surprised when the net response amounted to “ceviche and pisco sours.”
For sure those are requisite tastes, but the Peruvian food scene offers so much more.
While the people of Tarija, Bolivia will keep you hanging around, it’s the wine – surprisingly drinkable and made with grapes grown at an elevation of 6,000 feet — that Tarija is best known for.
Oh, Tarija. The women there are beautiful. It’s their smiles. They are the dream of every Bolivian man.
— David, our Bolivian guide for the Salar de Uyuni tour, delivers an animated testimonial for one of Bolivia’s lesser-known cities.
Cafés with outdoor seating line palm tree-dotted squares; cars broadcast opera from open windows as they cruise the plaza; wine lists measure longer than food menus; tablitas (ham, cheese and olive tapas plates) are standard fare; and smiles are in ample supply.
A Mediterranean-style culture smack in the middle of South America? Tarija is not your typical Bolivian town.
Thanksgiving may be over, but I’m still thankful.
We admit it – we are the worst bloggers. Many wrote their Thanksgiving posts a week or two before turkey day while others prepared something to publish on the day itself.
Then there’s us.
We intended – we really did – to publish a reflection yesterday, but life took over and filled our day with a raft of experiences and emotions.
What is it about land borders that attracts hookers, drifters, the down-on-their-luck and crazy travelers like us? The margins, the frontier: the domain of moneychangers, deal-makers, “friendship” bridges, duty free shops — and occasionally, garden gnomes. Passing on foot from one country to the next, the feeling of adventure rises with a heightened sense of possibility, good and bad.
Waiting at the Peruvian Border
The Bolivian Salt Flats. If you haven’t already been to the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, put it on your bucket list. Vast, stunning, barren, surreal — and a stark, beautiful reminder of how small we humans are, particularly in … Continue Reading
Value: a topic of great debate, perhaps nowhere more so than in the world of travel.
We’ve had friends rave about inns in Costa Rica that are a “great value” at $300 a night. At the same time, we’ve met travelers who do the “bad value” balk when accommodation anywhere runs more than $3.
Call one a spendthrift. Call the other cheap. Value is in the eye of the beholder.
“Oooh, Machu Picchu!”
Even my mom caught the hype when I told her we were headed there last week. As excited as she’s been about our travels, I think that was the first “Oooh!” of our trip she ever uttered.