On Amazonian Sharks and Other Dishes

Antojito Beniano, Itonama

Restaurant | "On Amazonian Sharks and Body Parts"

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As A Politically Incorrect Journal, this journal was born by chance. Walking around Miraflores around noon of Holy Friday, I found a restaurant advertising several dishes I didn’t recognize. Accordingly, it offered dishes from the Beni, one of the areas of Bolivia I still didn’t visit. Deep in the ...Read More

Member Rating 4 out of 5 on April 25, 2025

Antojito Beniano, Itonama
1969 Av. Saavedra Esq. Pasaje Florida, Miraflores
La Paz, Bolivia

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Restaurant J and B

Restaurant | "Picante de Lengua"

Quote:

While writing a food journal, more often than not I choose the reviewed restaurant just according to the dish they are serving. I wallk around until the desired dish appears. In the case of "picante de lengua" (spicy tongue) it didn’t take long. The desired dish appeared just next to the Monje Campero Cinema on El Prado – La Paz main avenue. Without thinking twice, I left the bright altitude sun and entered a very low room full with tables, chairs and an entertainment complex surrounded by four municipal guards watching an old movie dubbed into faulty Spanish with a heavy Mexican accent. That’s why the street outside was so messy."Un almuerzo" (a lunch) I said to an unseen waiter, and wait...Read More

While writing a food journal, more often than not I choose the reviewed restaurant just according to the dish they are serving. I wallk around until the desired dish appears. In the case of "picante de lengua" (spicy tongue) it didn’t take long. The desired dish appeared just next to the Monje Campero Cinema on El Prado – La Paz main avenue. Without thinking twice, I left the bright altitude sun and entered a very low room full with tables, chairs and an entertainment complex surrounded by four municipal guards watching an old movie dubbed into faulty Spanish with a heavy Mexican accent. That’s why the street outside was so messy.

"Un almuerzo" (a lunch) I said to an unseen waiter, and waited. It always works. Almost all Bolivian restaurants offer a set lunch option which is invariably better than anything a la carte.

Soon the entrée appeared as by magic on my table. Almost always they are unremarkable, and this one wasn’t an exception. The most interesting item was the llajua, the favorite hot sauce in Bolivia. It is prepared with tomatoes, aji and sometimes quirquincha on a watery base. "Aji" is the name for a local variety of elongated chilies. They come in a variety of color and are sweet or very spicy. For llajua, almost always the spicy and red variety is used. Quirquincha is a green leaf with a sharp flavor; luckily, it wasn’t present here since I dislike its taste. Unluckily, the aji chosen was not spicy, rendering an unbelievably sweet llajua. That was the first sign something was wrong here.

Soon the soup appeared out of the blue. Its yellow color told me it was peanuts soup. Native from eastern Bolivia, peanuts are used in a variety of unusual dishes here; their thick soup is exceptional. It doesn’t matter how it is flavored or what additions it gets, it is always good. More often than not, a small bone with beef or lamb meat swims inside. Noodles add a few more carbohydrates to this already fiery mixture.

Then, the spicy – but not sharp – tongue was laughing at me. It had been served with tunta, a potato and chopped tomatoes and onion. The tunta is what transformed it into an Andean High Plateau dish, though an adapted one, beef arrived here only recently with the Spaniards colonizers.

The tunta and chuño originate on regular white small potatoes and differ only on their dehydration process. During the Altiplano's frozen nights, the chuño is left to freeze on the ground surface after being harvested. Following that, it melts down under the morning sun. During the early afternoon it is pressed with bare feet so that the water is filtered out; the result is a black potato of irregular surface. Subsequently the dehydrated potato can be stored for years while keeping its quality. The unhygienic process is of little concern since the potato is boiled up before consumption. It has a very distinctive pungent taste. The tunta is obtained by putting the potato within a water stream for a fortnight. In this way everything except for the carbohydrate fibers is washed off the original potato. The result is a small, regular shaped, white potato with very little taste. Due to the differences in the process, tunta is much more expensive than the chuño. Most travelers find the chuño’s taste too strong; tunta is softer and more agreeable. If potatoes and chuño or tunta appear in a single dish, passing on the potato and choosing the dehydrated version is probably the best option for the traveler seeking for a truly local experience. From time to time, other tubers may be found. The elongated oca and its dehydrated version – the umakaya – are much recommended. The first is sweet as a yam, while the second features a pungent taste stronger even than the chuño. The tunta here was well done and eventually saved the dish.

"Picante de lengua" literally means "spicy tongue;" sometimes it appears also as "aji de lengua." The spiciness added by the aji balances the mild flavor and soft texture of the tongue, creating an agreeable dish. However, here there was neither "picante" nor "aji." Everything was as sweet as the llajua sauce.

While pondering if I should join the guards, the dessert landed in front of me. To small papaya pieces were swimming in an unclear liquid. With care, I took a bite. Sometimes, I sit in a place knowing the meal would be bad jut because I want to taste something special. More often than not, I know exactly which is the special dish I’m searching for; aji de lengua in this case. Seldom had I found myself delighted by one of the other dishes in the meal. This was one of these rare cases, the papaya bits were swimming in lemon juice and created an altitude ambrosia, that transformed guards and non-spicy spicy foods into a remote and irrelevant memory.
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Member Rating 3 out of 5 on April 25, 2025

Restaurant J and B
18, Campero Street next to Monje Campero Cinema
La Paz, Bolivia

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Interlude: High Altitude Pictures

Story/Tip

Quote:

Sometimes, taking great pictures is simple; the location is so amazing that dropping the camera on the floor while ensuring it will shoot on impact is enough to provide breathtaking images. In other occasions, you remember tips on how to take good pictures: you wait until the soft sunset light and do not face the sun while shooting the camera. You begin feeling like a pro when you reach a high altitude destination with awesome views. You remember and apply all the photography tips you ever heard of, but nothing helps. Great views, horrific pictures.Over time, I visited two high altitude destinations: the ...Read More

Sometimes, taking great pictures is simple; the location is so amazing that dropping the camera on the floor while ensuring it will shoot on impact is enough to provide breathtaking images. In other occasions, you remember tips on how to take good pictures: you wait until the soft sunset light and do not face the sun while shooting the camera. You begin feeling like a pro when you reach a high altitude destination with awesome views. You remember and apply all the photography tips you ever heard of, but nothing helps. Great views, horrific pictures.

Over time, I visited two high altitude destinations: the Himalayas and the Andes. By high altitude I mean being over 4000 meters above the sea level, where all humans need an acclimatization period. There, I learned the hard way that most photography rules are bent by high altitude radiation. Here are some tips.

You walk through downtown La Paz in a breezy afternoon. Out of the blue, Mount Illimani appears in its full glory. Excited, you take out the camera, make a fast - but attractive - composition, shoot the picture and move to viewer mode. Everything is vivid and nice, but Mount Illimani is nowhere to be seen. You enlarge the picture and after a while find out a vague whitish shape. The Illimani became an outline. Is the camera bad? Nearby, Bolivians dance in one of their crazed carnivals. You try photographing them. Most of their dresses colors and details disappear. You see glory, the camera captures garbage.

The problem is called glare, namely reflections of light by nearby objects. At sea level is a small problem. However, La Paz is oriented towards the southeast, facing Mount Illimani. The snow of the mountain reflects the sun radiation, especially during sunrise and sunset. Most pictures during those times would come out bad if facing the sun, Mount Illimani, or anything reflecting their light. Understanding that solves part of the problem – you’ll take the pictures about half an hour after sunrise or before sunset - but it still would leave you without good pictures of Mount Illimani. Learning to take advantage of the clouds is important; at high altitude, heavy, dark clouds occulting the sun are the photographer’s best friends. That works fine in the wet Himalayas, yet, the Andes are next to the planet’s driest desert; clouds are an oddity even in La Paz, almost completely across the range from the desert.

Yet, solutions can be found even without pro equipment. If you look at my picture in my IgoUgo profile page, you can see me next to the Everest, wearing Ray Ban sunglasses #1 (the opacity number, #3 is the darkest). They were perfect there, but rather useless in La Paz due to the wild glare in the last. In La Paz, I used #3, polarized sunglasses. Even then, looking at the direction of the sun during sunrise is difficult, that’s how intense the glare is due to snow reflections. Yet, polarized glasses are important since they diminish the strength of the glare. Thus, while taking a picture of the mountain, just take off the sunglasses and place them in front of the camera lenses. It may distort the view a bit, but almost always it would solve the glare issue without using expensive filters.

Then, you walk around and see a pretty street framed by an awesome forest and hill. You take a picture and then realize the street is in almost complete darkness, while the bald hill top glares as a miniature sun. You can either see the street clearly or the hill clearly, but no both at the same time. There is no magic solution for this one, but it is useful to realize many digital cameras allow you to define the contrast of a picture. In such a case, diminish the contrast as much as possible, sometimes, that would result in decent pictures under these heavy constraints.

Is that all? Not exactly, but these tips solve the main problems of high altitude photographing with simple and accessible methods. As always, the main point is awareness to the glare and contrast issues, then, solutions to other secondary effects can be devised on the spot.
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El Horno Camba

Restaurant | "Its Food!"

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"It’s food!" the girl attending the counter answered me and left me truly speechless.I was in a restaurant and have asked regarding the nature of "masaco," one of the items appearing in their menu under the unclear label "Mas Delicias Cambas" (More "Camba" Delicacies). It took me a few seconds to recover, but eventually I found the way to get a more useful answer:"What kind of food? Is it like a steak, a soup, or maybe a cake?" I ventured, attempting to expand her limited loquacity."It’s masaco, you eat it!"Something was very wrong here. I have reviewed the restaurant last year, when it was called ...Read More

Member Rating 4 out of 5 on April 27, 2025

El Horno Camba
221, Landaeta Street
La Paz, Bolivia

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Antojito Beniano, Itonama

Restaurant | "The Return to the Body Snatchers"

Quote:

Following the agreeable experience described at the beginning of this journal, I returned to Antojito Beniano, Itonama, for a second meal. Its menu was too exotic to let a few cat furs on the wall scare me.This time was a weekday, but the menu was no less varied. The set lunch included one soup and one main dish. "Locrito de arroz" was the only available soup. Main dishes were very varied, the most elaborated one were not available for the lunch and were offered as "extras," this is typical of Bolivian restaurants. Taking a quick decision, I chose the "majadito aguachento de charque + huevo," and proved once again the virtue of slow decision taking processes.While paying, it be...Read More

Member Rating 1 out of 5 on April 27, 2025

Antojito Beniano, Itonama
1969 Av. Saavedra Esq. Pasaje Florida, Miraflores
La Paz, Bolivia

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Bolivia Journals

Antojito Beniano, Itonama

Restaurant J and B

Interlude: High Altitude Pictures

El Horno Camba

Antojito Beniano, Itonama

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