After a lot of bumpy and frustrating roads yesterday, we decided to stay local in Cusco and not do another day trip. We got around by foot (or stroller) and even explored more local areas outside of the main cobbly tourist side of Cusco.

Traveling with a toddler always gives you experiences you would not otherwise have, and it also exposes you to service that you may not otherwise get. This morning while at a local coffee shop called Paqarin Specialty Coffee, Kaia accidentally pushed the unstable table where my hot coffee had just been placed, so a bit of the coffee spilled into the saucer. A cafe employee immediately noticed this, and instead of giving us a sympathetic grin, she actually took the cup and saucer away, cleaned it up, and topped off my coffee with more coffee and hot foamy milk! This level of empathy and service never would have happened in the U.S.

We also visited the more local side of downtown Cusco, where we stumbled upon a small kids amusement park. You pay one sol each for entry, and then an additional 1-2 soles per ride. Kaia got to go on the trampoline, the carousel, and a free “plane” ride, in addition to using the play structures in the park. This was definitely excellent value for us, and Kaia was happy because she got all the rides she wanted and was surrounded by littles.

I noticed that a lot of places across Lima and Cusco sell flat chocolate circles for consumption. From what I have gathered, it seems like dark chocolate is more popular across Peru and Ecuador. When you get chocolate options here, it’s very common for the chocolate to be 60-80 percent chocolate, with the remaining percentage consisting of panela, or raw, unrefined cane sugar; milk is not a given. If you want milk chocolate, you have to explicitly ask for it. Days before, we visited a coffee shop in Lima that had an upstairs chocolate store, where they had an illustration showing all the different varieties of cacao plant/flower that exist in Peru. It should not have surprised me to learn that over 20 varieties of cacao plant are in existence, with about three main ones cultivated today for coffee consumption. In Peru and Ecuador, if you go to super local markets, you can even buy fresh cacao the fruit and eat it. We visited the Three Monkeys coffee shop in Cusco, where they had one specialty coffee drink that used cacao fruit juice (and well, I tried to ask for it, but they said that it was so late in the day that they’d already run out of the cacao juice…). Here, the baristas noticed we came in with our toddler, so he was so kind and thoughtful to heat and froth up a fresh mini hot chocolate just for Kaia. She only had a few sips, so I ended up finishing it to find tiny pieces of delicious dark chocolate that hadn’t melted on the bottom of the cup.

Coffee and chocolate culture in Peru is strong. While Peru produces only about 1.7 percent of the world’s cacao beans, the quality is most definitely very high here. I definitely felt like I got more complex fruity flavors out of the high percentage chocolate we tasted here. I feel like this was the beginning of my (very late) realization that chocolate, like coffee, tea, or wine, can also be very complex on its own, that it doesn’t really need much sugar or even any milk to be delicious all on its own. And well, there’s more chocolate eating and coffee drinking to come in Ecuador tomorrow!