whacked with a guinea pig

So in preparation for my studies in Peru this summer, I'm reading Along the Inca Road by Karin Muller. In the first chapter she visits a curandero who whacks her all over with a guinea pig to diagnose her ailments, and then she sees another medicine man who treats her by rubbing her all over with stinging nettles. Yowza.

I guess my experience of the book is similar to that of this Peace Corps Writers review, which states: "This is a book written by a tourist whose mission it was to write a book. I closed the book having learned little about The Inca Road or the people that now inhabit its environs. What I read was largely a travelogue filled with anecdotes of self inflicted adventure" (...though self inflicted adventure can sometimes be quite entertaining, it's true).

This review from Entertainment Weekly gave the book a "B" when it came out in 2000. (The notable part of that brief review, to me, is that seven years ago, the reviewer felt it necessary to put in parentheses what GPS stands for.)