In hot weather you have to drink. In Colombia, outside of the capital which enjoys pure agua de paramo you have to be careful with the water. When we arrived in Campoalegre, they had a pitcher of boiled water in the refrigerator they keep in the bedroom that has a lock on the door. I didn’t do too much water drinking there.
Twice I bought a two and a half liter of Coke and drank a liter or so as there weren’t a lot of caffeinated beverages going around. We had no coffee from Friday morning till Saturday evening you see. Every once in a while I go crazy and drink some Coke. We had a lot of hot chocolate, which they really like to have for breakfast. We had lemonade and, of course, soup.
One thing they really liked and I also felt wise to avoid was the raspados. A raspado is a snow cone sort of thing, and they’re enormously popular. Instead, we had batidos. Batidos are made out of milk and perhaps egg and vanilla. They have a hand powered device they used in the park, and at the galeria (the market, remember) a blender. I think it works out to something like a milkshake but lighter, with a lot of foam. We had about six each.
Why so many? Because we got them with Uncle Waldemar X (perhaps more on him later: not his real name) who is known to do nothing without first asking if there’s a ñapa involved. What that is, is what is left over when you order a largish quantity (I am getting so Spanishized I just spelled quantity with a C, which cost me a long time to wrestle my self around to in Spanish). Odd concept, but then it is an odd country. Something like the liquid equivalent of a baker’s dozen, Maria Katrina tells me (that’s her Colombian name now; she went to the doctor all by herself for a checkup yesterday and as a result of that feat, earned it). It is one of the things you probably will never discover without a native to sniff it out.
Speaking of ñapa, we first learned about it with our sugar cane juice, also called guarapo. It ferments quickly apparently, and serves to get poor people drunk, is greyish, and you can add lemon. It is made out of wrung sugar cane; Uncle Waldemar X was reared on it. He told me of someone he knows making the best stuff in the land up in Mariquita, Tolima. Described the vats they sell it out of, the lines, how they add lemon, how it is spectacular and how that business is going to grow a lot. He stood very close to me and said in all seriousness, “I really, really enjoy guarapo.” On Sunday morning he came up and asked with quiet sincerity if I would like to go with him to get some guarapo before church. I declined, but mostly because I’m a Sabbatarian. The ñapa came in because when he bought four guarapos he asked if there would be a ñapa, and got his extra glass. They have roadside sugar cane squeezers and you can buy the juice fresh, or you can get it after it has been around for a while or so at which point it’s fermented and perhaps closer to being honest and true guarapo.
Our other local beverage was the chicha on Friday during the game. It was something cinnamony of a milky grey.
The last of these local, land and soil beverages was the mazato on the Lord’s day for lunch. That was more sour and the most grey.
All of these are longstanding native beverages. Mazato is made of rice, I guess, and cloves, guarapo of pressed sugar cane, of course, and I think chicha is something to do with corn, but I might be wrong. They must have all been somehow mildly fermented, at least they gave me that idea. I am, however, not being a drinker of alcoholic beverages, no judge. Lets just say they were probably all at least a day old. And considering the water situation, perhaps not entirely a useless precaution.
Unknowing 
The Chicha they have here at the Peruvian places is “Chicha Morada”, which is purple colored, non-alcoholic, and apparently made from purple maize.
Speaking of Coke, I recently watched “Cocalero”, which is the documentary about Evo Morales campaign to become president of Bolivia. I was shocked at how common Coca-Cola is in Bolivia. It covers the whole anti-American mood, and the fallout from Americans funding the eradication of coca crops. Anyway, one of the funnier scenes is when they talk to a wrinkled old coca farmer who start ranting about the Americans, and then concludes with “If they burn all of our coca crops, how could they make Coca-Cola? Then the Americans would have no Coca-Cola to drink!”.