Tripped

Schedule Changes

We hadn't booked a boat for the Galapagos Island tour yet, and in trying to narrow our choices down we discovered that one of the tour operators we were corresponding with was offering a 2-1 special. So we've moved our Galapagos trip up to February 10th, which means Arequipa is off the schedule. Tomorrow (Saturday) we're heading to the Sacred Valley and then onto Machu Picchu. A few days after that in Cuzco, and it's on to Ecuador!

Despite our best attempts to avoid it, we've also both been afflicted with the Inca's Revenge. Neither case appears life-threatening at this point, but it's made us homebodies since yesterday.

If You Hear a Duck Call

It's probably one of these bicycle vendors, who whenever they near a pedestrian blow the little plastic horns they carry with them trying to solicit business. Their version of the ice cream man's bell:

Inner City Blues

It feels crass to even point this out in a country so afflicted by poverty (which we admittedly have only gotten a small glimpse of), but the preservationist in me wants to cry at how much of the city's architectural legacy is being allowed to waste away, despite the fact that there's very little of it left to even preserve. Yesterday we saw a bit of that in another wander through Barranco, the nearby neighborhood that has turned into a sort of Limaean version of Soho (if you can remember when SoHo was first repopulated), a bohemian artists' ghetto that has become a trendy place to live but which still has far too many beautiful but abandoned or unmaintained 19th century buildings. One that I became fascinated by was this mansion, when I saw from afar how many of its roof tiles were gone:

Today we saw things even worse in terms of destruction of a legacy. We hired a wonderful guide named Carlos Morelli, who had been recommended by the local branch of the Explorers Club, for an extended tour of Lima Centro, the old center of the city founded by Pizarro as his Ciudad de los Reyes. From an historic preservation perspective you can only be appalled by what has happened, and is happening, to what was once the greatest city in the Americas (remember that Lima was founded nearly a century before Peter Minuet bought Manhattan from the Indians), despite that fact that as long ago as 1988 it was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Carlos, a Lima native and architect by training, moved back to his birthplace several years ago after spending 13 years working in around Venice, Italy, and now runs these tours as a side business while he works to produce a documentary film about the completely out-of-control development patterns and architectural history of a city he describes without any rancor as a "complete mess." We saw everything from a gorgeous 1872 exposition park that includes an art museum designed by Gustave Eiffel, to the oldest surving structure in the city - a bridge over the Rimac River - to the presidential palace, to churches, to the second largest Chinatown in South America, to a home that has remained in the same family since the days of the conquistadors, to a neighborhood famous for its denizens' ability to forge any document you want.

 

The image above is a beautiful if frayed street by day, but Carlos said you wouldn't want to be caught here after dark. Beginning in the 40s, Centro suffered from a slow-moving version of the "white flight" seen in American cities during and after the 60s, as the wealthier families that had once inhabited the downtown moved to the communities like Miraflores and San Isidro where we've spent most of our time while we've been here. So much of the downtown has been given over to the poor, with many of the old colonial mansions subdivided into slum apartments. (Shortly after I took this photo, we were accosted verbally from afar by a pair of street toughs after they were through wolf-whistling at the woman you see walking toward the camera on the left. We ignored them the way we used to ignore that sort of stuff in Jersey City, and Carlos only smiled thinly at them in passing while hurrying us onto the next block.) I'm not sure my photos will do justice to the more-falling down aspects of what we saw in Centro, in part because the areas where I could have documented it were the ones where my camera felt least secure.

Huaca Pucllana

Yesterday we spent the afternoon touring the ruins of a pre-Inca pyramid built by the Lima culture - also known as the Marenga - between 200 & 700 AD. I've added a new photo album from that visit on the right. It's now completely surrounded by the Miraflores district of Lima; indeed, parts of it were destroyed in the middle of the 20th century to make way for development. Obviously the Peruvians weren't quite as tuned into the tourist potential of their ancient archaelogical sites at that point. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this isn't an Incan ruin, and since that's who the conquistadors conquisted, that was all that counted in those days.

The Marenga were subsumed by subsequent cultures who also used this site for religious ceremonies. The Marenga did human sacrifice of young women and children - symbols of fertility, as our guide told us. The victims/volunteers (he eagerly related) were made drunk and/or drugged before having the back of their skulls smashed and their bodies mutilated. Some of the later cultures seem to have used it merely as a site for burial tombs. As recently as last spring they've discovered tombs with fully intact skeletons here.

Also interesting to note that this part of Peru wasn't conquered by the Incas until about 1470 - only a half century before Pizarro showed up. The Marenga, as a coastal culture, worshiped the sea, and from the top of the platform you could see the ocean from here before they built a city up around it. The Inca as a result didn't adapt it to their rituals since their primary deity was the Sun.

That Other Form of Security

I showed you the electric fencing; here's the other way some Lima homeowners like to secure their casas - that's broken glass embedded in plaster on the top of the walls surrounding this property:

Hooters of Peru

I couldn't see a waitress to get a picture, so I may have to make Eileen take me back there.

As I said about the Chili's - and the Tony Roma's - the retaliatory strike by the pan flute bands  now appears justified.

Adjusting the Antennae

As a longtime resident of Philadelphia and the New York City area - including Hudson County, NJ - as well as SF, I like to think that at this point in my life I have finely-tuned antennae for all manner of big city trouble. What's unclear is whether my internal tuning mechanism transcends barriers of language, culture, and geography when you transport yourself half a world away to unfamiliar territory. I have a pretty good idea how to stay safe in big and sometimes dangerous American cities, but can I do the same thing here?

Lonely Planet and the U.S. State Department did their part to ratchet up my desire to become more familiar with my surroundings here before I was willing to take my camera in my pack when we went out for walks the first couple of days. Both of them also have some pretty extreme warnings about what can happen to you if you get in an unlicensed taxi here, or don't keep your eye on your surroundings when you visit an ATM - but that's just as true of gypsy cabs and ATMs in the States.

Friends who have visited Peru have been helpful in relaying their experiences, as have to a certain extent the blogs and the expat message boards when it comes to factchecking the guidebook and government sources. But it all ends up being anecdotal, as there are few trustworthy statistics available. None of our friends have had any serious problems, for example; in the online venues, most of the people who have negative anecdotes have been travelling the backpacking/hostel/bus routes which we don't intend to use. Or have been really fucking stupid. Or in most cases, both.

In the end, you still have to go with your own gut, and start with the realization that the biggest difference between here and America is the motivation for theft. In the States, when you whip out your digital SLR camera in an urban location, you're displaying a crackhead's next several smokes. In Peru when you do it, it's the worth about 1/3 of someone's annual income. But in America, it's rare to see a cop on the street in most city neighborhoods; in the places we've been visiting so far there are police and private security guards on most blocks.

The end result? My camera has started to come out. But slowly, and with discretion.

Settled Into Our Apartment

Our apartment in Miraflores is quite nice inside - a small duplex with a living area and kitchen down, a bedroom up, and a view of the Pacific. The rental agency's pictures did not lie. The biggest drawback to it, however, is that we look out on a busy thoroughfare connecting Miraflores with the Barranca, the neighborhood next door, so it's a bit of an adventure crossing the street and it's very, very loud with the windows open. In addition to the sounds of rumbling engines and tires rolling over pavement, Limeans like to blow their horns A LOT. They also drive like maniacs, never sticking to any one lane, and often creating a third or fourth lane at random when there are only two striped on the pavement.

Very warm and sticky today, with lots of smog visible - we made the mistake of walking to and from the supermercado, and regretted it as soon as we got back to our sundrenched, un-airconditioned abode.

Sidebar

Just a note: the Internet connection here at the Radisson hotel in San Isidro is better than what we had at our Kimpton hotel over the weekend in Manhattan.

Arrival in Lima

The landing approach from the north into Lima's Aeropuerto Internacional Jorge Chavez gives you some stunning views of the Andes - when the clouds break - and a confirmation of everything we'd read about Lima's status as one of the largest desert cities in the world. The obvious sign is the dusty brown landscape you see everywhere that isn't covered by structures; the less obvious sign is the numerous large watertowers which dominate the skyline of the pueblos jovenes, the mostly low-rise slums that surround the city. Hoarding water is as important here as it is in Las Vegas or Phoenix, although it doesn't sound as if the municipal water company here is particularly efficient at its hoarding.

Our ride from the airport, which is actually in the port city of Callao just N/NW of Lima proper, was a journey from the Third World to the First World. The suburbs closest to the airport may not technically be slums, but they're definitely lower-income. The biggest indicator of this is the proliferation of exposed rebar poking up like radio antennae from the vast majority of the buildings. Your first thought is that Limean builders are by nature over-ambitious, planning a three- or four-story structure only to run out of money when they'd complete two or three. But I've since read a couple other explanations on the English-language Peruvian blogs: one claims the rebar is a sign of hopefulness, that as a family becomes more prosperous it leaves the rebar there in hopes of adding floors to accomodate an expansion in size, either via newborns, or via the addition of relatives emigrating from the countryside villages where many of these families came from to seek their fortunes in the capital; another suggests that as long as building owners can claim their property is unfinished, they can avoid certain taxes.

Rebar rises from the brown building in the center of this picture I took with my iPhone.

You know you're travelling into better and better neighborhoods as the amount of rebar per block declines. You also know this when you come to an intersection and see a Chili's on the corner (I expected to see McDonald's; I didn't expect the Chili's. Or the Tony Roma's, for that matter.):

San Isidro, where we're staying now, and Miraflores, where we'll be staying starting tomorrow, are much different. The streets are recently paved, the parks and gardens are well-trimmed, and if it wasn't for the electric fencing and/or shards of broken bottles atop the walls surrounding many of the homes - security measures that supposedly became very popular in these neighborhoods during the 80s political unrest here- you'd think you were in any number of European cities. The guidebooks don't lie on this point. We wandered around both neighborhoods today, walking down to the waterfront cliffs before having an excellent ceviche lunch at a restaurant we wandered into at random, then taxicabbing back to the hotel. Tonight we walked to the nearby Wongs, a supermercado that rivalled anything I've seen in Europe, to buy a bottle of wine and a roasted chicken for dinner.