Maybe sometimes you have to leave the party to hear the music…

I had to climb 1,000 feet above Urubamba before I realized how much I loved the little valley town.  From the top of the Cross Mountain on the first rainless day in weeks, I started feeling a little sentimental.  The new vantage point offered me a dustless, odorless and almost noiseless view of Urubamba (I say almost noiseless because the megaphoned voice of the market fruit vendor was echoing in the hills, ‘Uvas, uvas! Dos soles! Mango, mango! Un sol!...’).  Agnes and I used our fingers to trace familiar streets and houses from the bird’s-eye view, feeling more nostalgic each time we named a rooftop.  It was like we were drunk on sunshine and professing our love for our old smelly friend who suddenly looked like royalty thanks to our intoxication. 

But even now that I’ve descended (the return to the dusty streets a little like a hangover), I must admit that I still have been feeling a bit sentimental about my new home.  Especially when March snuck up on me like a leprechaun and I realized I only have three months left here.

It’s days like the Cross Mountain day that remind me what I’ll miss when I leave.  On the hike back down, Agnes and I picked huacatay (actually we later realized that I was picking huacatay and Agnes was picking a poisonous plant that looked like huacatay) to make a spicy sauce with fried yucca.  We snacked on sugar juice from corn canes in a nearby field and then went to the Casa ProPeru to harvest some wild spinach and pears from the orchard.  Agnes’s dad recently sent her a package of California snacks so we officially introduced the Germans and the Peruvians to a west coast salad: spinach, pears, candied walnuts, craisins, and a few other miscellaneous vegetables with a mustard vinaigrette dressing.  Que rico. 

What had been planned as a lunch date for three evolved into a dinner party of 15, but limes are 20 for a Sol right now so there was plenty of Pisco Sour to go around.  At the end of the night, I could hardly walk (due to my debauchery with the sun, not so much the Pisco… my gringa legs look like the Peruvian flag thanks to the sunburn line from my shorts) and my cell phone got flushed down the toilet, but hey---life is good.  I’m in Urubamba, what do I have to worry about?