Grave Failings In Peru : Lima : Tues 15th Apr

Our final morning in 511 Hostel is spent wolfing down plates of scrambled eggs like gluttons, as the rest of the hostel has failed to rise for breakfast and we can consume it all like locusts. Bags packed, farewells issued, bill paid. Big bag of clean laundry collected too. Sarah throws out a bleach-stained dress. We are nearing the time when our clothes will be destroyed in a frenzy, sick of wearing the same garments day in, day out. I am coming home with a sleeping bag and a Norn Iron football shirt. Everything else is dead to me.

Our taxi to our new hostel, 1900 Backpackers, skins us PNS$25, but thats what we get for not asking the price in advance. The huge mansion sits comfortably opposite the Lima Museum of Art and within easy walking distance of the Plaza De Armas and all the attractions located about it. With only two and a half days available to us to visit the museums (it looks a lot like Lima is going to shut down for Good Friday), we've got a busy schedule ahead of us. First we orientate ourselves, then we start soaking up information.

The hostel is big, the biggest we've stayed in yet, and busy. We're not used to this; so far we've been able to find our own space anywhere we've been. This might be a little trickier.

Out we go, wander through a few pretty parks, suss out our neighbourhood, and make our way up towards the Plaza San Martin. There, pre-empting our hunger, we indulge in a KFC. It's a remarkably nice KFC, clean and tidy and helpful staff and no spides. However, as the title notes, there are grave failings. There is no gravy. It's hard to imagine how this has happened, so integral to the concept of KFC is the gravy. Yet it is blatently absent from the menu. Perhaps it is up against some sort of food standards regulation. Maybe, with cocaine, Peru already has enough addictive substances to battle.

Still, the other thing you might notice is how fast food in Lima costs the same as it does back home. Any idea that this is where you go for a cheap holiday is a bit out the window. In fact, with such a fantastic range of activities, both outdoors and indoors, it looks like Peru might cost us more than anywhere else (except Uruguay of course).

The back of the Museo De Arte Italiano. More on that later.

From of aforementioned Italian Art Museum.

Palacio De Justicia

Not sure what this is but its gorgeous.

Churches, churches everywhere...

So many churches, so little time... all rich, rich, rich!

Today is the day for the Cheap Museums however. We make our way into the Santo Domingo Convent for a mere PNS$7 and, although very similar to the Santo Francisco Convent to which we went the other day, you have enough to justify the GBP1.50 cover charge, plus there's a big tower which, unfortunately, you're only allowed into in a group. If you get up it, there's a grand view of the city (apparently).

Beautiful Sevillana tiles

One big library, 25000 books, plus some chairs made specially to fit the bum-size of the various monastic scholars.

Plaza De Armas, Lima.

A little more walking and we come across the Lima Food Museum. At PNS$3 its really cheap, and for a really good reason. Three rooms of encyclopaedic information that could have been gleaned from Wikipedia, its non-permanent exhibition of Peruano recipes is the only real highlight. All the recipes utilise locally grown produce, and its fascinating to see how diverse the cultural influences on Peru's cuisine really are; from the Incas and pre-Incas, the Spanish conquistadores, the Italian immigrants, not to mention the Chinese and Japanese immigrants, all added a little something to the mix. For the most part, the key is freshness of produce. As we learned the night before,  a good ceviche isn't marinaded for more than 15 minutes before serving.

By now its 5pm and the museums are closing. Sarah returns to her bead shop to collect more 'ingredients' for her craft projects, and I pass the time reading the paper in Dunkin Donuts. As the sun sets we wind back towards the hostel. 6pm traffic in Lima is about as insane an experience as I can imagine. It feels good to not need to take a taxi home at this time. There are thousands of people thronging the streets, so many students and office workers all heading somewhere. We drift towards the Rea Plaza at the base of the Sheraton hotel. Its a hive of shops, a comprehensive food court, and a multiplex cinema. We haven't been to the cinema the whole time we've been in Latin America. I think we'll fix that in the next day or two.

Our neighbourhood isn't exactly a hot spot for pubs and bars however. When we get back to the hostel its full of all the life we feared. After sorting out what beds we'll sleep in, we grab a seat and make plans. What is there to do in Central Lima at night? Not many suggestions spring forth from the internet. We do learn that the museum across the road has a little cinema for showing arthouse stuff, and that a not-so-little pub up the road is one of Lima's secret gems. Both are now on our to-do list.

But that's really about it. We make small talk with a few guests, but everyone seems to drift off for dinner. Eventually, after a game of pool, so do we. A quick walk around the block suggests that, by 8.30pm, you probably ought to stick to the main road, unless you have ambitions to talk to young girls in cheap dresses with expensive pricetags. A little eaterie yields chicken and chips, plus a beer each, for PNS$21 all in. Bargain.

I have been working on some Norn Irish nursery rhymes for a while now, but without really attacking them with the vigour required. I give it another go this evening, but the excitement of the day overtakes me, and by 11pm its lights out. Up early tomorrow for some serious 'museuming', not to mention an anxious phone call to the UK Passport Office.

Customs : Lima : Sat 12th - Mon 14th Apr

The title was supposed to be 'Customs?' but it made more sense without the question mark.

One thing we dislike about Peru is the quality of beer is very low. Pisco is excellent, can't deny it, and for Peru it has reached the logical conclusion that Poteen would have in Ireland had it not been illegal. But the beer is weak, the craft beer market is tiny and difficult to access. It is acknowledged that Peruanos themselves go in for getting drunk and going dancing, which sounds a lot similar to the British culture, but these guys stay out til 7am, come home and sleep for four hours, then wake up at 11am and eat the spiciest ceviche they can get. Allegedly its the greatest hangover cure in the world. Anyone back home who feels like a bucket of fish and seafood in lime / coriander / hot as hell fresh sliced chile marinade might sort out a Saturday evening in the Duke of York, please let me know.

They do, however, enjoy a good fondue.

On Friday we received word that Sarah's medical parcel from home had arrived in Lima. However, what none of us had thought of, its not just quite that easy to send a bunch of vials of medicine to someone in Peru and they just get through customs just like that! We would have to go to the Fedex offices and collect the parcel in person with our passports. The downside of this is that the office was over near the airport, but further away. The airport ain't exactly close to Miraflores, and its in the cruddy side of town, over the Callao district. Not much fun. It has to be a taxi journey there and back.

Saturday morning we get up, Sarah still feeling grumbly in the tumbly, and about 10.30am we head out in our taxi. All feels pretty positive. Traffic is heavy but not too bad. Our lady driver takes the Costa Verde, a good excuse to get a look at the coast close up, and sure enough the view is as dramatic from the bottom of the cliffs as it is from the top. Getting to the airport takes about 40 minutes from our hostel. A little more detective work in her roadmap and we pull up outside Fedex's offices. So far so good.

But it couldn't be that easy. The chap inside tells us that Peruvian Customs ('aduante') must authorise the importation of the parcel before we can take it. They aren't open 'til Monday, and then they may want to come and verify the contents of the parcel before we can have it. Not only that, but then we will pay Fedex a holding fee for keeping the parcel til customs clears it. Sarah is screaming blue murder inside her head, swearing never to deal with Fedex again. There's nothing to be done however, and back out to the taxi we go. At least we have some concept of where things are.

Where the traffic had been reasonable on our way here, the sudden blue skies of Lima have prompted an outpouring of people to the Costa Verde. Oh God. Everyone in Lima is on the streets, horns blaring, and no one is acknowledging the road markings or traffic lights. Our driver gulders at a policeman 'QUE PASA???' but nothing doing. We try several roads before eventually heading back via Lima Central. The whole journey takes three and a half hours. Sarah and I sleep a lot of the way back. We are out PNS$70, about sixteen quid. We might as well have driven to Dublin and back (almost).

Saturday is a bit of a write off after that. Sarah has a lie down, I phone home and rant, we both feel better in our own way.

Fast forward to Monday. 8am. The same taxi driver lady is supposed to be collecting us as she knows where we're going. She's a no-show. By 8.30am we're getting Gonzalo, our host, to phone round trying to get a replacement driver. By 9.20am Juan shows up, ready to take (what I feel) is a very reasonable PNS$30 off us per hour. Sarah doesn't like the deal. I remind her that its about 7 quid an hour. We get going.

Traffic could be worse. Lima has a little of its grey fog swirling around the coast today. The big marquee on the beach for Lima Fashion Week is being dismantled. Juan is a good driver, and we are at the big Customs Commercial Centre in double quick time, about half an hour.

This place is not what I expected. Dodgy looking humans are hanging around trying to make money out of everyone. My tenuous grasp of the Spanish language is not enough to deal with difficult situations like this. We get directed into some office, where some child starts filling in our paperwork. Sarah correctly decides that this isn't right. There are people trying to point you in the direction of various offices, all there to make money out of people. We end up in another office after excusing ourselves from the first. These guys point us towards the enormous customs house at the end of the block. In Spanish, the expression is 'es una locura'. Its mental.

So we go to one window, then another, and get the perfect girl to solve our problem. She speaks perfect English, gives us step-by-step instructions, and then accompanies us in our taxi to Fedex. There, clad in hard hats (for some reason), we open our parcel and account for the contents. She is serious but helpful. All done, back to the taxi and back to the customs house. A wait, I eat a muffin from breakfast, we get our clearance, back to Fedex, pay $35, receive parcel, return to hostel.

Four hours of our lives we shall not get back.

Sitting on our beds we were too stunned to cry with relief. Its not that the process was overly complicated, because it wasn't, but that the sheer mental force required to get through a process like this in your own country, let alone another, is immense. Utter concentration the whole time. If anything goes wrong, BOOM!, your mind begins to leak from your ears. We were the lucky ones. Some of the people wandering round the customs building looked like they had been there overnight. No wonder a pharmacy was across the road.

Time is going fast now. When we left it was 22 weeks or so of trip. We are down, with an extension, to less than seven. With deadlines in there for receipt of passports, application for ESTA passes for the US, getting from one enormous city to another, 60 hours away, this little adventure was one I could have lived without. Yet we did it. The box was glorious when it was opened; Tayto Cheese And Onion, Galaxy chocolate, Cadbury Creme Eggs, and of course medicines for Sarah. I didn't even need to open the Tayto to know how they smelled, it was all stored in my head.

We found lunch, post-showers, in a small Italian restaurant, where we again pondered the Peruvian love of sweet pasta dishes. Sarah's Spaghetti Bolognese (real spaghetti for a change, normally its 'tallarines', or spaghetti-esque noodles) tasted of a dusting of icing sugar, whilst my penne al alfredo definitely had a spoonful of sugar in its creamy white sauce. Not the greatest lunch ever. Dessert was 'Keke De Cafe', literally a slice of sponge cake with a shot of espresso poured over it.

We searched desperately for the chocolate museum as a distraction, but it was not forthcoming, and back at the hostel we sorted out another 4 days accommodation, this time up in Lima Central, within walking distance of all the nice museums. We already booked our flights to Cusco for the coming Saturday. Its Semana Santa here, and everything is getting booked up rather quickly. We had a choice between a 21.5 hr bus journey, via a lot of places we had already been, or pay an extra tenner and fly to Cusco in a hour. Easy decision.

Our hostel has inherited some German boys who snort a lot. It drives Sarah mental. That hacking / snorting noise of people who cannot clear their sinuses is probably the most disgusting noise in the world. We ran away, otherwise Sarah would have killed them stone dead with a big knife and we would not be coming home soon.

Only funny because I know a family called 'Bruce'.

We went to Houlihan's Irish Bar. They didn't sell any draught beer. I was very upset and we left. If an 'Irish' Bar back home didn't sell draught beer, the world would end. We walked to Murphy's Irish Pub and they sold draught Cusqueña and Pilsen. PNS$10 a pint. It was better than bottled. We ate Tayto Cheese N Onion. Thanks Rosemary!

Sadly the bar was terrible and we were the only people there. They played German digital radio (including the news) and advanced onto some horrid mixing of disco greats. We ran away from there too and went to the Cat Park. There I petted about a dozen different cats, a lot like the Kinkaid house in 1999. Sadly then we had to go home and pack.

We had finished our Friday night with a beer or two.

We finished our Saturday in a much more civilised manner. Our hostel has a big tv. We had some nice Knorr Cream of Asparagus soup. The tv has TCM. We had Gandhi with Sir Ben Kingsley. I'm not sure everyone in the hostel really understood that sometimes, even when you're travelling around South America, you need a movie night with some basic food. In our local, very fancy, Waitrose-type supermarket, I got some nice pepperoni snacks and nice brown baps. I declined the expensive pisco. I fell asleep before Mahatma was assassinated.

 We had arrived back after our trip to / from Callao to the sound of familiar accents. Turns out a load of Donegal hallions had descended upon Lima. I don't understand why only Donegal folk have the stones to travel the expensive wastelands of Latin America, but maybe they feel at home here. Ha Ha. Smiley Face. A fine bunch they were, all kids but with Father in tow, celebrating his 60th birthday we a trip to Peru and, inevitably, Machu Picchu. I was reminded of those po-faced hipster articles, berating things that are popular as being 'crap' by definition, and usurping them with 'much better' alternatives (eg the Amazon is crap, Brazil's Pantanal is brilliant, which it is, but let's have some perspective, you horrible hipster world-destroying bastards. Ah, the grief and the grudge).

Anyway.

Somewhere in the middle of the night I awake to the sound of voices. I battle back to sleep quickly. Sarah remembers it differently; as a drunken, very very drunken, domestic taking place, and a man repeatedly declaring "Jesus says NO to tea". I know someone turned a light on a one point, but that didn't last very long.

By 9am the room stinks of pure alcohol. We get up and, slowly but surely, the hallions are roused from their beds. Dearbhla is violently sick. This does not interfere with my enjoyment of the triple-chocolate-orange muffin that is my breakfast. The little bakery across the road is clearly run by Mary Berry herself.

It takes a while but everyone is alive. Dearbhla takes altitude sickness tablets in case they work whilst she and everyone else is stuck on a seven hour bus ride to Ica. I am glad I'm not on that bus. Sarah and I strike out for Barranco, the next neighbourhood down from Miraflores, and the most Bohemian district in Lima.

Its a brief 60 minute walk away via the coast. Miraflores' apartment blocks never seem to give up, nor do the middle-aged men with the small dogs. Its creepy in a David Lynch sort of way. A shame that everyone is so civilised and pleasant, and meets your eye with a nod of the head in salutation. Otherwise this could be Blue Velvet.

Barranco isn't as grand scale as most bohemian neighbourhoods we've encountered, but that works in its favour. Its effectively two main roads with connecting roads along the way. Halfway along is the path leading you to Lima's Bridge Of Sighs, which takes you past a bunch of overpriced restaurants, a lookout point, and final winds down to the Costa Verde. It's all very picturesque. We don't buy any bracelets at all, and wander past some skinny model doing a photoshoot. There's also plenty of cats around here. The view from the walkway at the end of the path is simply glorious. It's not hard to believe Lima has inspired some great literature, like Melville's Moby Dick, because it is a dramatic looking city. What's hard to believe is that hard time it gets from those who visit it. I really want to send everyone to Pisco to give them something to really complain about.

We catch a taxi after discovering Barranco's big attraction, its brewpub, closes at 6pm, about 5 minutes after we discover that fact. Miraflores is quiet on Sunday evening. We sit down with our big tubs of salad and soup for dinner, intending to watch Red Sonja, a movie I had erroneously mis-remembered as a Cold War flick, not a dodgy fantasy tale. Still, Arnie movies are generally ok. But we had the company of Ali and her mother, who regaled us with tales of life in Miami and Lima, where and how crimes are committed in Peru, recipes for ceviche, and why exactly Sarah has been suffering a bad tummy for a week now (its something in the air, according to Ali, but more specifically its a bug that all travellers pick up in Peru with the bad water and different hygiene standards). Its great to get a local's input on things, even if they are (apparently) 4th-generation Irish. My iPod was 3rd generation. It didn't even have a passport.

So we don't watch Red Sonja, nor Dick Tracy, and In And Out is way out. Its nice talking with normal folk about things we're interested in. Somehow we end up stuck to our seats at 1am, trying to find out who sings this song we've been addicted to the whole time we've been here. That information is not forthcoming at 1am.