Chillng OUT
WHILE I was tidying out an old drawer the other day I came across a beautiful little bag.
It was woven very finely in gaudy pink and olivey green. A fantastical animal that looks like a winged dinosaur with a wide, curling tongue arcs across the front and another one comes out of the corner on the back.
Picking up the bag and turning it over in my hands, everything about the day — way back in 1982 in Bolivia — when I purchased it came back to me: the clear blue of the sky, people planting potatoes out in the fields; the weavers sitting crosslegged in the fields, working their small looms on the ground in front of them, using bits of llama bone furnished as tools to work the warp and weft of their weavings.
In Sucre the night before, I’d met a Swiss girl at the hostel who told me she was travelling to the tiny hamlet of Ravelo to see if she could find the famous Jalq’a weavers and asked if I’d like to come along for the ride.
We bumped along in the rickety green bus, climbing high into the mountains for about two and ahalf hours, the only foreigners on board.
Finally we reached Ravelo, the tiniest of hamlets. At around 3000m above sea level the air was so dry your throat felt dessicated just breathing it in. We found the weavers out in a field behind the town and, after spending time with them, buying a couple of bags each and enjoying the simple picnic we had brought along, we wandered back to the bus stop.
In this highaltitude climate with zero humidity, we both felt parched and a little dizzy. A crowd of scruffy children had gathered by the bus stop where a young man, barefoot, wearing a dirty Tshirt and torn jeans, was selling shaved ice from an ancient machine towed behind an old bicycle.
For a peso, the vendor would crank the handle on his ice machine, shaving a mound of tiny fine ice flakes from the giant barrel of block ice into a small plastic bag. Picking up an array of plastic squeezy bottles he squeezed a rainbow of fluorescent syrup over the top — green, pink, red, purple and yellow. The few lucky children who had the necessary peso clutched tightly in their hands were in a state of ecstasy, gabbling in Quechua (the area’s native language) and leaping around the square in delight. The rest stood around looking forlorn and scuffing the dust with their bare feet.
I don’t think I’ve ever wanted to eat something so much, the thought of that cool ice easing my parched throat — but the alarm bells started ringing … in these parts the possibility of Montezuma’s revenge lurked in every mouthful of water, whether fresh or frozen.
We handed the vendor a pile of pesos so that all the kids could enjoy a bag of his shaved ice and hopped back on the bus to Sucre, still dry as a bone but happy at least in the knowledge that we had made the day for a bunch of hardup kids.
When you need to cool down, an icy treat always hits the spot. These recipes fit the bill for any age or taste — vegan, vegetarian, glutenfree, even dairyfree if required.