Back To Reality With A Bump

Back To Reality With A Bump
Lima, Peru

Lima, Peru

After 6 months in New Zealand, a week sunning ourselves in French Polynesia and 17 days and 4,930.2 nautical miles of luxury cruising it was safe to say that landing back in the real world of back packing was going to be a massive shock to the system.

We woke up from our 1000 thread count white Egyptian bedsheets and looked out of the window over a grey and murky port of Lima, time to face reality and get back to the world of hostels, cheap dinners and having to think for ourselves to plan our every move whilst quickly learning some Spanish.

After a long wait at the harbour due to our switched off brains and incompetence we eventually made it to our waiting taxi and were wizzed through the streets of Lima to our hostel. Having read all the horror stories in Lonely Planet we were a little apprehensive about Lima as it came with whole host of warnings about taxi kidnappings, window smashing and bag snatching and of course the usual muggings.

We were like fish out of water, all the Spanish knowledge that I had in my head seemed to turn to sponge and I couldn’t string together even the most simple of phrases to get us by. Tim was usually the language expert leading the way, but here it fell on me and so far I was doing a pretty diabolical job, even if I do say so myself.

Thankfully after a day or two of realising that we were not going to be mugged in the middle of the day in the main tourist square in Lima and the warnings were as usual aimed at the more retarded backpackers, who think that walking home drunk at 4am waving around an iPhone is a good idea; we managed to relax and to get back into the swing of travelling like paupers.

Lima is a pretty cool city and we possibly didn’t have enough time there to fully explore and to appreciate all it had to offer. After the first day of walking around a bit dazed we then only had 2 days to see the main sights and sounds as we had booked a cheap flight to Cusco to avoid the 24 hour bus journey.

Our first day exploring Lima well and truly won over my heart. Kennedy Park in Miraflores, the main tourist area has a square, full to bursting point of stray cats. They have piles of food, bowls of water and plenty of tourists and locals all there ready to give them a stroke. No one is quite sure how all these cats came to be here in the park, but there are a handful of locals that go out of their way to feed, neuter, vaccinate and ensure that they all remain healthy. Despite my efforts to convince Tim that this was really the only place that I wanted to visit in Lima he dragged me kicking and screaming out of the cat park as I managed to get one last stroke and ear rub with as many cats as I could.

We had a really helpful host at our hostel who had given us a ton of information as to what we should see and do and how we should get around. He told us about an express bus that was cheap and easy which would get us to the old town in Lima to see some of the old architecture. We made it to the bus terminal, bought a ticket and everything was going smoothly until we reached the various platforms with absolutely no information in Spanish or English as to which bus we needed to get, it seems that our helpful hostel owner had omitted the most useful piece of information, the bus number! We waited for a while as bus after bus filled to busting point past and eventually we decided to just brave it and we hopped aboard. We knew that the journey was going to be about 30 minutes but didn’t have any maps or landmarks to follow to know that we were going in the right direction. After about 35 minutes we seemed to be leaving the city and entering the slums and decided that we needed to take action. Tim wanted to stay on the bus but I was not feeling it and at the next stop we hopped off and got back on the bus going the opposite direction. An hour later we were hot, stressed and back where we started. I knew we should have stayed in the cat park.

Desperate to recover from this miserable failure of a day we had one more stop on our list that seemed feasible and didn’t require a bus, the Huaca Pucllana clay pyramid in the centre of Miraflores just a few blocks from our hostel. When you think of Peru ruins everyone just things of the magnificent Machu Picchu but these ruins built nearly 1200 years earlier between 200 and 700AD by the Lima people are something to behold. This would have been the main ceremonial and administrative centre for the Lima people and holds numerous tombs within its many walls. The views from the top of the pyramid are sensational, as this is just bang in the middle of the city. You know that you are in South America when you are walking alongside the pyramid down a lovely tarmac road with ruins on both your left and right… yup that’s right, these ruins were in the way of the road planners design so they just knocked down the ruins and built the road where they needed it. TISA (This Is South America)!!!!

Our final day in Lima we still had plenty to see so first we explored the waterfront with amazing views over the coast and finally caught a hop on hop off bus which took us to the old town that we had failed to make it to the day earlier.

The joy of open top buses is that you can just relax and watch the world go by, you can take photos from above without sticking your camera in someone’s face and can really capture the feel of a city or its traffic problems. The highlight of this tour and the place that we had tried to get to the day before was the San Francisco Monastery and the home to Lima’s catacombs. We had read that these were something pretty special, but sadly having been in the past to the catacombs of Paris, these were pretty poor. The actual monastery was stunning but sadly photos inside were forbidden. Tim sneakily managed to take one photo of the catacombs which was about as good as they got.

We did it, we finally managed to adapt to life back on the road. We saw everything we had planned on our list, we found some great places to eat cheap, my Spanish started to improve and we even managed to go to the pharmacy and source Sorochi Pills the local meds suggested when you are headed to Altitude.

We hadn’t really given altitude a thought until now and reading horror stories of headaches, vomiting and cerebal edema had us slightly worried. Not much we can do about it now except take our sorochi pills and hope for the best; Cusco, here we come!!!