Back to the past - this isn't your typical farmer's market

Well, we are back in Cusco now after completing our trek. We are all in one piece, mostly healthy, and have learned a lot about each other (note to self - some stuff isn't meant to be shared!). But more on that later - now to continue on the story which I left off after visiting the school ...

This isn't your typical farmers market

So, in the morning we had our belief in the generosity of people completely affirmed at the fantastic Chicuchas Wasi school.

To give us a further taste of what life in Peru is really like, we then went to the local market. Not the tourist market, but the real market where the locals come each day to buy their meat, fruit and veg. Fair enough I thought, a farmers market.

Uhhh, not really.

1. It was huge - filled with tourists as well as locals, despite the fact that we were there in the quiet part of the day (as with all markets, early morning is busiest). We had old grandmothers, hard-working adults, and cute babies in blankets.

2. The variety was massive - electrical goods, clothes, hardware. Massive items from stacks of freshly cut sugar cane, down to fine spice measured out in minute quantities. And of course, food.

3. The food was, let's say, 'confronting'. The bags of beans of all sorts, huge varieties of potatoes, fresh fruits of all types (I tried an overgrown variant of passion fruit that was delicious - sweet but not as tart as the normal one) were what the guidebooks would lead you to expect. But of course the fresh meat was the real difference to Australia.

Rather than our neat piles of sausages or chops behind glass at the butchers, or under plastic at the supermarket, the meat was right there. In your face. Just out of reach of the dogs, not quite out of reach of the flies (though there were mercifully few of those).

Let me paint some images:
- a pile of raw de-haired guinea pigs, still with ears, eyes and little buck teeth sticking out.
- buckets of live frogs, matched with buckets of eviscerated frogs after they've had their gall bladders removed (don't ask me why).
- masses of meat, with legs, ribs and heads all juxtaposed.

And one of our group, Julie, is a vegetarian by moral choice. I don't think this helped convert her back to being an omnivore!

Not your typical Australian farmers market. But then, our food for the trek all came from markets like this, and it was delicious. Everyday we got different meals depending on the region we were passing through, and every dish was lovely, tasty and fresh. None of us ad any tummy trouble.

So - not an Australian market, but it works really well for the people here, and from personal experience I can assure you that it results in fantastic meals.