Carols and El Cóndor Pasa

 I saw some people having a competition on social media recently. Simple rules: when you hear the Wham classic "Last Christmas" you're out; everybody still in by midnight on Christmas Eve wins. Playing from Chile would probably be an unfair advantage, though, as there's been remarkably little in the way of Christmas music here. What I've heard has mostly been in Spanish (unsurprisingly) or instrumental versions of classic carols (thanks, Santiago airport). I'm more thankful that there hasn't been any Slade, though.

An interesting, non-seasonal version might be to see how long you can go in South America without hearing a version of El Condór Pasa. So far, three weeks in Pucón and Santiago yielded zero sightings, but last week in the Atacama desert, not all that far from the Peruvian border, we heard it twice. Neither was the Simon and Garfunkel version, but we did hear a pan-pipe version of The Sound Of Silence at Baltinache. That's where we got that pair of fancy pisco sours (one with rica rica, one with chañar) and crab claw with cochayuyo (or possibly an un-Googleable desert plant with almost the same name), above.