Lima

Day 151 (November 26, 2018) – Lima, Perú

We only had three days in Lima. Two of them were spent shopping and the last was spent walking around the city center. Our introduction to Lima was pretty terrible. The Uber ride from the airport to our Airbnb apartment in the Miraflores neighborhood took forever. We sat in traffic for ages. We didn’t think we were ever going to get there, and by the time we did finally arrive we were already dreading the ride back to the airport in a few days. Lima is huge and congested. Distances may not look far on a map, but they take forever to travel across with all the traffic.

The view from our apartment. Modern Lima is mostly an eclectic collection of high rise buildings and not much to look at.

Some of the crumbling mountains in Lima.

Lima appears to be sitting atop a crumbling cliff along the Pacific coast. It’s not the dramatic Pacific that you might imagine in California. It’s the cold, angry, and windy Pacific that makes you glad you’re on land. It also looks like it hasn’t rained in a hundred years. The earth is cracking and falling into the ocean, but that doesn’t stop the high-rise buildings from taking their spots on the edge of cliffs to claim an ocean view.

The store where I was able to get the soles of my hiking shoes reattached. They had these funny advertisements showing shoes before and after being repaired.

We don’t even have that many photos from Lima because we spent most of our time on a mad dash of a shopping spree. This was our last stop in South America and we wanted to pick up a myriad of necessities while our dollar was strong before heading down under where our dollar wasn’t going to get us nearly as far. We replaced some worn out clothing, looked for new sandals, had my hiking boots repaired, replenished our stock of sun screen and bug spray, and even picked up groceries in anticipation of our upcoming trek in New Zealand. Lima was full of shopping malls and department stores, which made shopping an easy but time-consuming affair for our first two days. We also indulged in a number of good restaurants and craft breweries, knowing that we would be living on the cheap once in New Zealand.

Grocery shopping for a couple meals at home and for our upcoming hiking trip in New Zealand.

We made sure to take care of our errands at the beginning of our visit so we could spend our last day walking around the historic center of Lima. We saw lots of plazas, churches, and government buildings. We also visited the remains of Francisco Pizarro, the original conquistador of the Incas. He was responsible for slaying the first Inca ruler and later killed by his own men. For better or worse, he was the European who changed the course of history for the Incan empire and much of South America.

A collection of skulls in the basement of the Cathedral of Lima in the historic part of town. 

It was hard to believe that the Central and South America portions of our trip were at a close. We also realized that this was the point at which our Spanish language skills were probably going to be at their best. Our proficiency was far less than what I imagined it would be after five months, but we came a long way from when we first started in Guatemala. At the time, it was exceedingly difficult to hold a conversation with the host family we stayed with in Antigua. I would have liked to return to them now to show them how far we’d come. We still can’t discuss anything too complicated in Spanish, but we can manage the basics.

One of the many grand plazas in Lima's historic center. This was one of the largest, Plaza Mayor de Lima, which is surrounded by the Cathedral of Lima and ornate government buildings. 

The tomb of Francisco Pizarro.

We spent our last night organizing our bags and cleaning off our tent and hiking boots. Early the next morning we took an Uber back to the airport. We thought we had escaped the traffic by leaving so early, but after an entirely traffic-free ride all the way to the airport we got stuck in a half-hour traffic jam on the small circular road that led to the passenger drop-off. The traffic is simply unavoidable in this city. Adios Lima!