Well, dearest blogwatchers, I've been back from Peru for almost 2 weeks now and already the memories are starting to take on that soft-hue fuzziness, as the immediacy of the trip fades and real-life rushes back in. I've already had one trip to Philadelphia for work since I got back, and am off again in a couple of weeks to Zurich, followed almost immediately by my trip to Napa for the half-marathon (which I will update you on in my next blog post), so its certainly been a busy start back after my vacation!
To stave off the post-holiday blues, I always immediately start to fantasize over my next trip - be it another biggie like Peru or Bhutan or littler trips like Santa Fe or Austin. My question for you, dear blog watchers, is this - where would you like to see me go next? ("to hell" is not an acceptable answer here). Here are a few ideas that I've come up with - some of these are obviously more feasible than others but just for now, I'm not going to limit myself with such mundanities as budget or available time off work. This is the Inaugural SITC Fantasy Vacation League, so anything goes! Which one(s) get your vote?
Taking the Hurtigruten Ferry up the Norwegian coastline in winter to go searching for the Northern Lights
Sailing round the Galapagos Islands on a beautiful yacht on a wildlife photography trip, followed by a trip to the Amazon rainforest
Follow in Genghis Khan's footsteps with a horse-trek across the Mongolian Steppes, staying in traditional yurts
Go to Canada and stay in the Tundra Buggy Lodge for a close-up and personal encounter with both grizzly and polar bears
Visit the Okavango Delta in Botswana during migration season to see lots of incredible African wildlife on a walking-style safari
Reach for the heavens and do some serious altitude trekking in Nepal to either Everest base camp or the Annapurna circuit (assuming conditions have returned to being safe etc etc)
Go herd sheep and other outdoorsy stuff in New Zealand
Hike live volcanoes in Java with a vulcanologist-guide (hey, Spock!)
Visit Finland and stay in a thermal glass igloo so you can lay in bed and look up at the Northern Lights dancing above your head
Well, that's it. The official part of our fabulous trekking vacation is now over. This morning we say farewell to Cusco and fly back to Lima, where we stay until our respective flights home late Saturday night. I always find these parts of any big trip sad, when you have fewer days in front of you than behind you, but we're determined to make the most of our last couple of days, so its not all over yet!!
One of the brilliant things about having been back in Cusco was
that its provided the perfect controlled experiment to see just how well we’d
acclimatized over the previous week’s trekking. Beforehand, climbing up the stairs at the El
Mercado was enough to get us out of
breath but now, we fairly bounded up those buggers like alpacas on
spring break! I must admit, I did feel
slightly superior in that moment to those less acclimatized than
ourselves. It felt a little like a rite
of passage, as if this was our reward for the heart-busting hikes of the last
week. Its also a powerful
illustration of how rapidly the body can adapt to changes in its environment
(within reason, I guess – I wouldn’t recommend trying to adapt to being
underwater. It would be a pretty short
lived experiment…). We’d been off the
Diamox for a couple of days by this stage (and things had thankfully returned
to a non-tingly state) so I was curious to understand what had been going on in
my body over the last week. I consulted the Interweb and this is what I found out - all fascinating stuff. http://anthro.palomar.edu/adapt/adapt_3.htm
Anyway, transfer day to Lima was smooth enough, aside from the first bit which was a bit stressful as the taxi driver to take us to the airport was 20 mins late AND the honey that I'd bought last week hadn't been delivered to the hotel as promised (the chia seeds and jam had arrived, but no honey). Fortunately they had a pot of Back-Up Honey in MLP's office in Cusco (hmm...I can just imagine them rapidly steaming off the shop label from the honey jar!...) so we stopped en route to the airport to pick it up. Honeygate was thus prevented from reaching a full on hissy-fit but I was distinctly unimpressed, so Grumpy Face made a brief reappearance....
Happy birthday to me! (again!)
Of course we made it to the airport in plenty of time to enjoy the chaoticness of the departure gates. Ours changed at the last minute, but miraculously we made it onto the plane nonetheless and, just over an hour later, we were touching down in Lima. Now, one of the first things I noticed about Lima was how cloudy and grey the skies were. Lima is right on the coast of Peru but, while there may be some sandy beaches, there are certainly no blue sky and sunshine to go with them! In fact, as we learned on the city tour we took the next day, Lima basically has 2 seasons - summer and winter (sound familiar?). The winter is when the sky remains cloudy (they call it donkey belly grey) and misty the whole time with no sunshine - and this lasts for 7-8 long months. Then there is a very short summer of about 4 months, before it reverts to winter again (OMG - it IS a Peruvian Chicago!). Another curious factoid about Lima is that it never rains. Yep. Never. How weird is that? Even weirder is that, because of this, the entire city is built without any type of drainage at all! No gratings or drainage holes anywhere on the roads or sidewalks. The roofs of the houses are all flat too.
Yummy fancy salad thing that Lisa had -
delicious!
Anyway, we'd booked a nice hotel in the touristy part of town, an area called Miraflores. This was were all the main hotels were and also lots of tasty cafes and restaurants to choose from. Straight after we checked in, we went to go and talk with the concierge and find out what our options were for booking a couple of tours on our last day, before we headed off to the airport. We managed to book a city tour for first thing Saturday morning and also a night-time water fountain display show that would nicely fill our evening until about 9pm (our flight wasn't until 12.30am). That little job done, we celebrated by sitting at the bar and drinking local champagne (much better this time) and eating cheese, so this hotel was certainly hitting the base levels of my personal Mazlow hierarchy. We then nipped out to the local supermarket to buy pisco, chocolate and alfajores (success!) before returning to the hotel for a quick snooze before dinner that evening (see how exhausting this vacation is!). Only then were we rested enough to head out to I K Restaurant for my celebratory birthday dinner - its a hard life.
All the food was beautifully presented as well as tasting amazing
so it was an excellent choice for my b-day supper!
Former mayor's residence in Miraflores*
The next - and our final - day, Saturday we had our two tours to keep us nicely occupied during the day. In the morning, we'd booked to go on the Lima city tour - we were a bit wary of doing a group tour again, after the mass experience in Cusco, but we thought sod it, it was easy and relatively inexpensive, so we can suck it up one more time.
Our first tour departed at the very civilized hour of 9.15am, so we had plenty of time to enjoy the hotel's breakfast buffet including, yes you guessed it, quinoa waffles!! They were actually pretty tasty, especially slathered in maple syrup and chocolate sauce, so it was probably just as well that part of our tour of Lima was a walking tour!
A little mini-bus turned up on time and we trooped on board. There were only about 10 of us in the bus, so we were pretty happy about that and that we weren't on a big tourist megabus. That lasted until the mini-bus dropped us off at the central meeting point for all the little mini-buses and we were ferried onto, yes, a big tourist mega-bus. Sigh.
Lima mobile home?
The tour lasted about 3hrs in total and we actually saw quite a bit of the city and learnt, and saw, some mildly interesting stuff, which I will now duly bore you with. These "facts" may, or may not, all be true:
Stuff you might not know about Lima:
The average wage is $200 a month
There are 10 areas in the city, which are then split further into 43 districts.
Each district has its own mayor, taxes, laws, mascot and Pokemon character.
The last earthquake was in 1974 and it was a biggie that caused massive damage to the city
The highest hotel is 35 stories high - nothing is built higher because of the risk of earthquakes
They have a festival in October every year to honor/placate the god of earthquakes (SF, take note!)
The houses and buildings are painted brightly to make up for the perpetual cloudy skies and lack of sunshine
They are a big producer of asparagus and 3000 varieties of potatoes (I think I probably consumed most of these during my time in Peru)
9 million people live in Lima, out of a total of 30m in all of Peru - most people are from the Andes
The majority of the cars use natural gas - parp!
The majority of the cars do not use indicators or rear view mirrors
The majority of people who drive cars are completely bonkers
The traffic in Lima is certifiably insane and far, far worse than even Manhattan traffic
Lima cabbies are a special kind of crazy
Road junctions are more like suggestions, rather than edicts to stop for oncoming traffic
There are no umbrellas anywhere in Lima
Ummm... sorry, I cant remember what this one
was. Possibly the Peruvian government??
The first part of the tour was driving out of the Miraflores district and heading towards where all the big government buildings are. There is obviously a huge colonial influence on the city from the Spanish conquistadors that you can see all around, though this has become a bit of a mish-mash over time as they've had to keep rebuilding as a result of frequent earthquakes! The whole city has a faded glory to it - you can look at these slightly shabby and traffic-soot stained grubby buildings (probably not helped by the lack of rain to wash them clean) and wonder what it would have looked it when the city was in its prime.
Every city has its own Flatiron building!
After about 20 mins we all trooped off the bus where we were then separated into two groups - one with an English speaking tour guide, the other Spanish. We got our small group tour after all!! After this divvying up, there were only 8 of us, so that actually worked out pretty well. Lisa thought our tour guide was a bit weird (I thought he looked a bit like a Peruvian David Duchovny) and we had a bit of trouble understanding him sometimes, so I will blame any historical inaccuracies hereon in on him, rather than the fact I probably wasn't paying close enough attention.
Entrance to the Bank Museum
The first stop, then, on this walking portion of the tour was the Central Bank Museum. Now, this is probably something that Lisa and I would never have bothered checking out on our own (museum? yawn) but it was absolutely brilliant! I think having been steeped in the culture of the Incas and MP for the last 10 days had heightened our appreciation for the craftmanship of the time. The artefacts on display were quite incredible - lots of pretty shiny things as well as fabulously ornate pottery and textiles. We only stayed for about 20 mins which was a shame - both Lisa and I definitely wanted to stay for longer. Fortunately there was not a gift shop…. http://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g294316-d646052-Reviews-Central_Bank_Museum-Lima_Lima_Region.html
Fortunately we didn't have to follow the flag,
we had Peruvian David instead.
Fancy lighting in the Central bank museum
Ancient Incan kettlebells.
Quack
Ceremonial robe made of feathers - pretty
impressive!!
Stunning gold jewelry
Just make sure you choose.....wisely
Incan cufflinks
Cool, huh? Anyway, after that, we walked out towards the main plaza and the Cathedral and Convent of San Francisco, passing along the way the bar where the Pisco Sour is supposed to have been invented. Peruvian David told us a bit about the history of what was built when, but I really can't remember any of it, so sorry about that.
Approaching the main square
Our first stop was the cathedral, where we got about 5 mins to whiz round the inside. More than enough time for me, as churches and cathedrals leave me completely cold. After the cathedral, the next stop was the Monastery right next door, where the main attraction were the underground catacombs!! Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take any pictures anywhere in the monastery, but here's the link instead. The catacombs were spooky enough, with piles and piles of monks & donor's bones stacked up in big rectangular pits. At regular intervals, there were grates where you could look up and see directly into the church over the top of the catacombs - I think we may have freaked a few people out by waving at them….
The other really cool bit about the monastery was the Harry Potter-esque library which was full of gently molding and decaying books that were hundreds of years old (no Morgan-library-like preservation efforts here!). Its the second biggest library in Peru with 30,000 books (I think) but you can't obviously take any of them out (or even handle them) as they'd fall apart. The library itself was spectacular too - all twisty staircases and wooden alcoves. Mumsie - I'dve never gotten you out of there! http://www.museocatacumbas.com/english/index_en.html
A pointy building
A yellow pointy building with ornamental fountain
This could also be the home of the Peruvian government
OOOOoooo!!! I know this one, I know this one!! Its a museum
made from an old railway station.
Cathedral
Somehow I managed not to mug this woman for
her churros
Girl in a large pink dress. As they were only about
15yrsold, hopefully this was not a wedding...
Still the cathedral.
This was made out of silver. Lots of it.
How on earth did this completely illicit picture
of the catacombs below the monastery get here?
Insanity traffic
After the monastery, it was time to rejoin the rest of our group for the drive back to the hotel. One girl was very upset because she'd had her phone pick pocketed as she bimbled about outside the Cathedral. The tour guide didn't seem that sympathetic - but I guess it probably happens a lot. We drove down by the ocean front again (the same way we'd arrived yesterday) and got back to the hotel at lunchtime, so then immediately headed out to a little cafe, recommended by the concierge, for one of our last meals in Peru. It was, again, excellent - ceviche to start with, followed by an excellent steak and finished off with a donut thing with pineapple. Yum yum!!
"the kiss" statue in Lima. They're a passionate bunch, these
Peruvians
Looks like Brighton Pier - but is a romantic
seafood restaurant
Well dodgy loo at our lunchtime cafe stop!
DEEEE-lish!! Lisa had fried prawns and I had
(another) ceviche. YUM!!
Followed by a solid lump of beef - and the
ubiquitous potato
Pineapple churros - nom nom nom
Following lunch, I did a bit of blogging and sleeping, while Lisa discovered the new delights of Juice Jam, before our final tour for the day - a nighttime tour of the fountains and a light show. The fountain park had been opened recently, back in 2012 and was both for tourists and the locals. It was actually really nicely done - there were about 13 or so fountains spread out in these well-manicured gardens and lawns (no-one was allowed on the very springy, lush grass, which probably helped to keep it looking nice - if you did, you got shouted at by a man with a loudhailer). It was a fairly mild night too, so it was very pleasant to wander around looking at the fountains (it was just me and Lisa and our tour guide, so we finally got our private tour!). The show was about 25 mins long and it was OK - i'm not entirely sure if its what I expected or not - at times, I did feel as if I'd stepped back in time to the early 90s, but it was enthusiastically done, so it was fun to watch. Loopy - I took a couple of vids just for you so you can also enjoy the "show"!
And then that was that. We were done with the show by 8pm, so got dropped back off at the hotel where we chilled out for a couple of hours, and crammed the copious amounts of alpaca into the suitcase before it was finally time to bid Lima, Cusco and Peru a very fond farewell and head off to the airport. I will post my final musings tomorrow, but this has been an absolutely incredible trip. It completely surpassed my expectations - and I hope you've enjoyed reading all about it too! My final thoughts, top 10 and travel musings tomorrow, but in the meantime, enjoy the fountain show!
