Lima Part 2: Boston is not the only great bean town on a coast in the Americas

There's something incredible that happens when travel gives way to accommodation. There's a peaceful lull in the pace of action and a person gets to take a minute to shake themselves in their own flesh and see what time has wrought. For me, that morning in room four of the Stop and Drop hostel in Lima, the results of this assay were greasy, generally under-maintained, and deeply creased with the lines indicative of clothing worn for days as it gradually distorts. Everything I wore peeled-off with a perceptible grip reminiscent of the sensation that one feels in removing thin plastic from food that has been thoroughly packaged, and I recall doing a great deal of stretching, shuddering, yawning and rubbing.

In an attempt to push this reinvigoration regimen to its logical zenith, I gathered all of my necessary artifacts and made my way to the men's bath. The shower was, at first glance and with growing intensity as my investigation continued, an object of profound mystery, and strangeness from showers I had known previously. The bathroom itself was a somewhat dirty, wet-floored location with cubicles formed at odd angles inside a superstructure with ceilings unnecessarily high for its current purpose as communal bathroom.

Unlike the electric fixtures of Quito (which require, at once, both adept maneuvering to find a rate at which water is heated fast enough to provide warmth and wetness simultaneously and an iron will to remain below a stream of water emanating from a cheesy plastic device attached to outlets of both the water and the power systems of a given building by shoddy looking pipe and even shoddier looking wiring that is producing thin wisps smoke and a vague scent of burnt electrical tape) this was a return to water heated elsewhere, presumably by gas, and pumped to many locations on demand. The head of this shower was merely a rounded, metal cap with a single circular opening about half an inch in diameter, and so the shower unleashed what amounted to a warm pee, aimed in a fixed direction, at approximately eye-level. To describe it in words, and think back on it now, it seems nearly impossible to explain the refreshment that such an obviously flawed device, such a vague and degraded facsimile of an idealized form of the shower, provided me with that morning. It was amazing.

Having both bathed and broken fast, we went out into the city to take care of a few things (read: eat), to bask in the pure coastal-ness of everything, and to have some words with the good people at LAN about changing our return date to Lima and making our newly-gotten bus tickets usable. We began with LAN, which was only a few blocks away on a street filled with banks and gigantic gringo restaurants.

I have been having some difficulty reconciling the jokes we made about them at the time, and my overall memory of them as something generally helpful and innocuous into a fitting description of the ladies of LAN offices throughout the continent. By this point in the trip we had had roughly three contacts with computer-manning LAN employees (ladies) during the course of our airport check-ins and in Piura, and now in Lima it became humorously apparent that there was a sort of aesthetic division of labor in play throughout the airline. Women with a blonde dye-job, a particularly flashy style of dress or hair or adornment, and men were placed in positions of flight attendance, whereas, their other homelier comrades, were dressed in the trademark vests and ties of McDonald's management everywhere and made-up to look roughly like Frieda Kahlo with her hair pulled back really tightly.

We entered the office, smiled at the guard, took a number and were amused to find ourselves classed, for the purpose of this interaction, as disabled and our number called at the designated handicapped window. The Friedas also, seemed to chuckle nervously to one another when they noticed us noticing this and talking about it with one another in Spanish. Continuing in this vein we goofed our way through our requests, and managed to get the tickets changed by one day for a mere fifty bucks each. Galapagos was saved for now, we thought, and left the air conditioned office for the hot street again.

Once outside again, we decided that the focus for the rest of that day ought to be Lima, because despite our foiled Nazca hopes, we planned to leave it as soon as we could, and after that day we'd only really have about five days left before our scheduled flight to Buenos Aires.

We strolled in the sun, got some sidewalk fruit, had a conversation with an old man who had augmented his begging routine by adding a young retarded boy who made trinkets and passed them out to everyone in a great and weighty showcase of pathetic generosity, surveyed the nearby parks,

From 2010-02-26

ate some lunch,

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and then promptly fell asleep in our room. It was an involuntary but extraordinary six-hour siesta, and afterwards we somehow managed to get more food

From 2010-02-26

before going back to sleep.

Real-time Homecoming and A Hot Day in Piura

Jiggity Jig - April 25, 2010

I'm back in Iowa (likewise, Miriam is back in Pennsylvania). This actually happened about four days ago, but I still haven't quite gotten used to the feeling. The adventure is still warm in my senses and on my limbs. The way to describe this place and its familiar features seems to take the form of only one word, thus far: opulence.
My stomach too seems to be experiencing difficulty understanding what has happened in the last few days. Suddenly the milk is fresh again, not that stuff that will stand forever at room temperature in a box. The cupboards are brimming full with a well-stocked collection of the rare elements that drive tastebuds mad the world over. My guts aren't prepared for this access, and they're letting me know that I must take things slowly.
Anyway, among the opulent features of the life I find myself rejoining is a constant access to the internet, which should be a real boon insofar as the updating of this blog is concerned. So, without dwelling any longer on understanding and telling the concluding portions of this tale, let me continue with our trudge into the depths of Peru.

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We sat, sweating and thumbing through our respective guidebooks (Peru was the only country for which we had afforded this kind of redundancy, hauling both the Footprints 2010 and the Lonely Planet 2008). We had already bought our tickets from Piura to Lima, and were now on an endurance race to kill the many hours that lay between us and our departure time, something like 1800 hrs, in the least unpleasant way. I don't remember exactly what we were looking for in our books, and in fact the search was probably more of a general survey of Peru-bound possibilities, but I do remember at least one thing that we found.

Somewhere in Lonely Planet 2008, I think near the front of the book and perhaps in a section giving some cultural overview of the country to be toured, I ran across a passage warning travelers about a known hazardous time of year for the South America sojourner: Semana Santa. Holy week, the book informed, was a time when all forms of transportation and lodging clogged with use, and also a time when fares were jacked up from sixty to one hundred percent. Unfortunately, for erstwhile Lutherans like myself, holy week is not something that falls on a hard and fast date year after year. Rather, one can find it lurking vaguely in the range of March-April. This, as many of you know, was nearly the entire range of our trip, and a very scary unknown indeed.

We left the bus terminal, each of us carrying all of our possessions once again, and hobbled off through the streets of Piura. We had goals now, and because the sun had not yet reached its zenith we were still confident in our ability to enjoy accomplishing them.

The first problem to be addressed was a lack of food. Our maps of Piura were terrible, and we ended up at a bank first, so Miriam withdrew some Nuevo Soles. As we once again entered the flow of Piura foot traffic, we began to notice that we were still too early in the morning to hope to find food on the street that was not sold in a package. We sat down on some benches in front of a huge church and waited in the shade for half an hour. Now things were beginning to wake up, this must have been around 1000hrs. We located a little place that appeared to do some food and while I ate a jamon y queso, Miriam tried out the first ceviche of Peru, one so memorable for its quality that she would reference it throughout the remainder of our trip. It was a refreshing, albeit not (relatively) cheap desayuno: the ceviche probably cost between three and four dollars.

From 2010-02-25

From there we walked back out to the main plaza and had a look around. Miriam had noticed a tourist information office that had been closed before, adjacent the bank. That office was now open, air conditioned, and likely to know all about Peru's potential diversions and probably the precise dates of Semana Santa this year. We went in and were given what I found to be a completely hypnotic and exhaustive explication of every archaeological site in Peru by a pleasant young woman with a very methodical, rhythmic and soft tone. At one point, during something like the fifth of seven or so maps of different regions of Peru, my head slipped off of my left hand and lurched quite close to the table. After learning about more than a lifetime's worth of Peruvian attractions, we finally had the good sense to ask about the dates of holy week. Which, as it turned out, was scheduled for precisely the time when we would hurriedly revisit this expansive, international road trip on the way to a date with the Galapagos. We left, freaked out about our newfound scheduling debacle, though now equipped with an extensive collection of maps and pamphlets and two fine complimentary ballpoints.

Our next stop: LAN. We crossed the plaza again to investigate the true malleability of the terms and conditions of our South America Airpass. As I recall, we entertained a few ideas about how best to overcome the problems then coming to light in our itinerary. If we were lucky we could just rearrange things to suit this obstacle: shift each flight outright, cut out one leg, add another. If we were less lucky, we supposed, we might have to do something more drastic altogether, such as lose our second stint in Peru altogether and fly directly from Santiago back to Quito. As it turned out, neither of these options was within the range luck afforded. The details of our itinerary had become final once we made our initial flight, and any additions to the trip would fall under the insane pricing schedule that usually applies to foreigners flying under LAN. The best we could hope for was to shift the dates of one flight for a less insane fee, and hope for available buses when the time came.

As we left LAN, worried and somewhat underwhelmed by the apparent inflexibility of our trip, we soon forgot thoughts of our grandiose logistical problems in favor of thoughts such as "Why are we carrying all of our stuff right now?" or "Are we on the surface of the sun?" and, of course, "I know I'll regret saying this but, I wish we were on the damn bus already!" We dragged our under-rested bodies through the streets, almost as though we were pulling dying pack animals (ourselves) through some hellish desert, while onlookers smiled and chuckled, and made me wonder about just how stupid we looked and whether we weren't really that stupid. At that moment, we seemed to me extremely stupid, though a very nice person could probably get away with simply describing us as ridiculously unfortunate or perhaps retarded.

Not wanting to melt, and seeing few options aside from pushing on, we bought water, checked our email, and then headed for an ice cream shop. One great thing about traveling with Miriam is that ice cream has an almost cinematic ability to save the day.

From 2010-02-25

This ice cream experience was, thankfully, no exception to the physics of Miriam, and the good vibe carried us back to the stifling bus station, and all through the end of the wait and the process of boarding. And that's where the next chapter begins: on the road to Lima.