Peru 2005: Day 1 — Wandering Lima
DAY 1: Wandering in Lima ("Go With It")
We arrived a day early so that we could wander around Lima, get our bearings and recover from any jet lag. Waking up at a reasonable hour, we grabbed breakfast and quickly discovered how nasty coffee in Peru really is. In fact, it is labeled “coffee extract” and is simply folgers (or maxwell house) brewed 3X over normal and then boiled until a thick sludge. I had 2 cups that morning.
The hotel we were staying at (Sonesta Posada del Inca el Olivar ) was in San Ysidro, a nice business district. We figured we spend the morning walking to the Huaca Huayamarca pyramid close by. Walking in Lima is dangerous….and we almost got ourselves killed crossing the street several times in the 6 blocks to the pyramid. “Go with it”….became the theme of the day.
Turns out the pyramid was a total let down, but the good news is we were slowly becoming desensitized to cars clipping our heels. We also noticed the preponderance of security guards! There must be a union or something. Every single house we saw in Lima had nasty, vicious barbed (or electrical) wire or sharpened iron bars surrounding the property. However, we did see one very nice house without a single protection scheme, for this house had two full-time security gaurds standing in front with 1940’s era machine guns slung around their shoulders.
A few quick side notes about our first day in Lima. Because of the omnipresent low fog layer and choking brown exhaust fumes coming from every vehicle, the sky was one uniform dull shade of gray. In spite of my eyes tearing (from the exhaust) and the ever present street vendors, poverty, crumbling paint and graffiti, we noticed one amazing detail: there simply was no trash on the streets in LIma. No paper in the gutters and no litter on the road median. Lima rivals Tokyo for lack of visible trash on the ground!
Returning to the hotel we decided to venture out. With a little bit of work, I convinced the hotel concierge that we wanted lunch at a moderately priced place that served cebiche. Somehow this translated to “Take the gringos to the most expensive restaurant and be sure to charge them triple the taxi fare.”
Sure enough, we ended up paying 16 Gringo Soles (for what should have been a 6 Nuevo Soles ride) to get to Mira Flores and the El Senorio de Sulco restaraunt. Yes, the restaurant was superb and the cebiche the best I have ever tasted. The other thing that was superb was the 200 Gringo Soles price tag for the two of us and the lack of prices anywhere. We managed to scrounge through our money belts and dig out the cash, as neither one of us had felt brave enough to bring a credit card out (or camera) out on the streets.
“Go with it!”, we said to ourselves and enjoyed a stroll along the cliffs of Mira Flores. No photos (sorry) because both of us were too unsure (and chickens***) to bring our cameras through unknown territory (lesson learned).
The path along the cliffs is amazing, low stress, and mostly devoid of the throngs of people found elsewhere in Lima. We even saw a bunch of wanna-be hang gliders (wanna be, because they were all just sitting around). It was truly relaxing all the way to Larco Mar, the strip mall of Mira Flores. At Larco Mar we found the familiar (read: revolting) sites of Tony Romas and Hooters. We ate churros in the food court (failing miserably even in our attempt at food-spanish-speak) and then headed towards a central park.
“Go with it,” we told ourselves as we walked along block after block of gringo free streets. After 30 minutes, we reached our other destination (another Sonesta Posada) and hailed a taxi from the street (evidently a big “no no” in the guide books). I did my best to ask the price of the ride ahead of time (with a pitiful “quanto vale” or something like that) and didn’t even bother bargaining the 6 Soles rate.
And thus began the most interesting part of our time in Lima. Turns out “Pare” in Lima-spanish translates to “Go with it”. Taxi drivers don’t stop and are perfectly happy with an inch on either side as they shimmy through a traffic circle. The truth is, we were never scared during the ride, as things happened too quickly and too far outside our realm of normal logic . Instead, I chose to sit back and enjoy the ride, content to “go with it” like I would a roller coaster in the states.
Back at our hotel, we joined some of the other early arrivals for a (nervous, first time meeting LOTS of people) Pisco Sour. A Pisco Sour is like the sweet sister of Margarita. They are kind of light and frothy and quite agreeable.
We then joined the group for a tasty dinner, and discovered that there is no such thing as “light Peruvian food”. Appetizers were all the group could put away, and consisted of super tasty beef hearts, empanadas, tomales and more. The drink was a purple (looked like a cabernet actually) drink made from corn that tasted like bubble gum. I believe it was called something like Chicho Morado.
Another hair-raising taxi ride home (even the taxi driver yelped in fear as a car opened its door in front of him) and it was time to re-pack and head to bed, as we had a l-o-n-g day in front of us. “Go With It!” (which, when abbreviated and slanged that night became “gwee”, which sounds a lot like the Quechuan word for guinea pig).
