Later That Day

We got out three maps before leaving the Stop and Drop to explore the old city and wrote down the names of some other hostels to investigate. If you've ever looked at a guidebook on Peru or South America more generally you might already be aware that Lima defies what I had considered widely held cartographic assumptions and expectations. There is no such thing as a map of Lima, rather the reference materials consisted of maps of vague seemingly inconsistent sections, districts, and regions of greater Lima (this should give you some idea what I'm talking about) as it splashes back from the coast and up into the hills.

So we looked at our maps, holding them up next to one another, or flipping pages back and forth to try to construct a cohesive vision of the route, thought about it for a while, stashed our bags in some lockers and headed off on foot. This seemed like something that people could do, even given that we were getting hungry and it was probably 95 degrees.

We walked and talked our way up through a long shady park set between the lanes of a wide divided road. Eventually, we ran out of Miraflores and its consistent and plentiful foliage found ourselves walking along mostly a lot of sunny residential streets interspersed with gigantic crossings, roundabouts and other traffic-shaping devices that seemed all seemed gigantic. We managed to figure out how to traverse a number of these traffic formations without becoming unfortunate road splatter before coming to this point:



We worked our way around this circus, and, as we did, got to watch a lot of traffic negotiating. We waited at a crosswalk, fantasizing aloud about finding lunch by this point, and watched as a man with a clipboard yelled to all the bus drivers who passed this corner and then received some amount of coin in a can borne by what I guessed was probably a nine year-old boy. Mostly, this system seemed to be tuned to a degree that was remarkable. Words flew back and forth, the kid stood in the gutter and held the can aloft, change was deposited smoothly, and then as we watched the pace of traffic started to pick up. The next bus that yielded at the corner had only a few seconds before the bus driver felt himself inextricably yanked into the flow of traffic. Words were being exchanged, but as the bus lurched past the corner the change was cast hastily into the street. The man with the clipboard quickly assigned blame and meted out punishment to the youth, though it seemed apparent to me that the backhand was redundant, the kid was already looking dejected about his poor performance in the face of this challenging can-handling scenario.

Miriam and I drank some of our warm, metallic water and resumed our walk. As we moved along we brought out our maps again and tried to get some sense for how far we had come. Two of the maps, the ones with tight views of Miraflores and the Old City were completely useless. We had come to a place of dubious importance to even the most intrepid of casual guidebook urban Lima hikers. Presently, I located the big St. Michael roundabout on the map, we estimated our movements to this point as having been approximately 1cm per hour. At this rate we would reach our destination in a matter of hours, not minutes. We started to look around for alternative modes of transportation.

In a city of seven million taxis, the ones that we saw in this part of Lima had that distinctive *Taxi for a Day* look that we now found unappealing both in terms of general threat to life and property and because we didn't want to have to try to feed directions to another taxi driver who knew about as much as we did about where we were and how to get where we wanted to go. We emerged again from neighborhoods onto a new, dry-grassy median-park and back within the network of the collectivos. In two or three blocks we had gotten our change together and found some people to ask for a proper vector toward a bus that would get us to the old city.

Eventually, in a way I would become familiar with as the way these rides always begin, a dingy white bus with stickers proclaiming a range of religious affiliations slid up to the curb, preceded by the voice of the man who hung from the door hocking rapidfire locations with names jumbled together like a practiced auctioneer. This man is almost always ferociously convinced (and convincing) that his bus is the one that you need to get you to where you need to go, and will only really clarify directions once the heat of the stop has given way to the brief and intermittent reprieve of collecting fares, doling out tickets and getting repositioned for the next corner sell. We sat in the bus, feeling the fake, oily, wind of vehicular acceleration. My legs ached a little, my shoulders relaxed and filled the grooves left by bags slung heavily and shifted unconsciously from arm to arm over the course of an accidental hike...