Sun in Lima

For most of the year, Lima is grey and overcast, and the air is sodden with moisture, and when it is windy, it feels awfully cold, but today the sun shone through, and the city looked entirely different. We had lunch at Larcomar, a complex of shops and restaurants built into a cliffside with a view of the shoreline 200 feet below and the Pacific beyond. Peruvian cuisine is sophisticated and quite wonderful, so I took advantage of the buffet and 20 different dishes, and then as many small samples of each dessert on my plate as well.

Eric worked on his computer all morning. I joined the group of alumni on the bus with Sonia, our guide (the same one we had five years ago) and Antoinette, the tour leader. We are staying in San Isidro, one of the 40 or so neighbourhoods in the city of 9 million inhabitants. The city is spread along the coast for miles and miles. and all the sites are far from one another. It makes sense to take a tour, which turned out to be exactly the same as the one we had five years prior. Sonia added many more comments this time and pointed out many buildings and oddities on the way.

I learned that the country bird is the cock of the rock (we tried to find one when we traveled to Mindo without sucess), the country tree is the quinine tree and the flower an Andean lily. The flag is red white and red, much like the Canadian flag without the maple leaf, but has the Peruvian insignia (with a vicuna and a quinine tree) in the white part of the flag. The government buildings hoist flags up with the insignia, but private establishments can only use the white and red one. Everyone in the country is required to vote, and if they do not, they are fined and cannot get married or have a bank account. Sonia never stopped talking as we drove along, and I wish I had jotted down all the interesting anecdotes she offered. I hope they come back to me later.

We drove to the historical centre, where we circled the Plaza San Martin twice as we were instructed to pay attention to the woman with the llama on her head. The story was that the sculptor of the memorial to San Martin, an Argentinian who helped liberate Peru from the Spanish, got sick and had his assistant add the last flourishes to the statue, mistakenly adding a llama instead of a flame to the head of a woman. We stopped at the main Plaza de Armas, where we walked around the beautiful square. The cathedral and archbishop's palace occupied one side, the presidential palace another, the city hall the third side, and shops appeared all over the plaza. Beautiful wooden balconies stand out as architectural oddities. The buildings are painted yellow, apparently because that was the colour of the Hapsburgs, who were the royal family of Spain at the time of the conquest.

La Casa de Aliaga was nearby, a lovely colonial house which has been in the hands of the same family for centuries, and has been preserved and unchanged since the time of the Spanish conquest. We had visited the house five years earlier. The cathedral has been restored several times, due to repeated earthquake damage, and is famous for being the resting place of he conquerer Pizarro. The San Francisco church and monastery are walking distance away, and there our goal was to see the catacombs, which are the burial places for Limeno inhabitants from the 1600's to the early 1800's. My favourite part of San Franscisco is the library, which is one of the oldest in the Americas and full of dusty deteriorating volumes.

It was when we left he skulls and femurs in the catacombs that we encountered the sunshine. It is the first time I have seen sun in Lima and it was lovely. We dove through more of Lima, dropping off many of the tourists at Larcomar and having this wonderful momentary view of the ocean glinting in the sunshine. By the time I drove back to San Isidro and returned with Eric via taxi, the sun was gone and it was getting colder. We had lunch at 'Mangos' and then headed for the gold museum, where the first floor is full of weapons and uniforms of war. I almost questioned whether we had come to the right place, but we found the vault underneath, where thousands of Chimu, Vicas, Moche, Lambayeque, and Inca gold artifacts were arrayed in a rather disorganized and cacophanous way, to overwhelm me. I believe all the gold was stolen from graves, so there was no provenance, no way to know where anything came from . The pieces were impressive, the precoumbian cultures quite sophisticated with metallurgy, with an abundance of gold and silver to work with (Peru's number one industry is mining, with vast deposits of all sorts of precious metals and materials.)

I liked the mummies too, which are amazingly well preserved, with natural hair and often displayed with grave goods and textiles and ceramics. I loved the museum, but Eric just tolerated it, and was eager to move on and shop for nets and batteries so he could catch fish in the jungle. Our taxi driver had waited for us and agreed to take us to the mall for 10 soles an hour. We spent alot of time looking for the items Eric wanted amongst the Saturday night crowds. When we got to the hotel, Ricardo our friendly chauffer, wanted 10 dollars an hour instead. I was ready to fight him, but Eric insisted on paying the outrageous amount he asked for. I think that Ricardo decided after watching us buy batteries and nets and a flashlight, that he could ask for three times as much and we would pay, so we did.

Our flight leaves early in the morning for Iquitos, which is closer to Quito, and was once part of Ecuador until the war between Peru and Ecuador which the latter lost. We have a 5 AM wakeup call, so it is early to bed for our adventure in the jungle tomorrow.