Lima Sightseeing (July 6, 2006)

Many travellers that we have talked to don’t like Lima at all. In the winter time (May – September), the city is covered in fog from the ocean, and I think many people misinterpret this as being smog; the city is not any more polluted than any other big city in South American that we have visited. Yesterday when we arrived the sun was shining and it was hot, so maybe we received a different first impression, or maybe we were just biased because I used to live here. However, it was cloudy and raining for the next three days we were here, and we still loved it. Most travellers also stay in the Miraflores neighbourhood because they think that the centre of Lima is dangerous. While Miraflores has some great restaurants, shops, and nightlife, it certainly lacks all the gorgeous colonial buildings and the character of downtown, and we didn’t find central Lima to be dangerous at all. Probably if we had walked around at 2am we might have run into some trouble, but during the day the area is full of businesspeople and lots of police, and almost every building is a work of art. It would be such a shame to come to Lima and not visit the area around the Plaza de Armas and the San Francisco Monastery.

We started out our day by opening our door and being greeted by a turtle. Yup, the hostel even has two turtles on the roof! One of them was particularly friendly so I pet him, and he followed us to the restaurant and proceeded to make the rounds of the tables looking for handouts. We couldn’t resist and gave him some of our fruit. There are also some parrots and a macaw on the roof of the building, right above our room, so we awoke to lovely bird chatter in Lima.

After breakfast we had a tour of the 16^th century San Francisco monastery, which was very impressive. Not only does it have eerie catacombs, but it also has a great library with books that are hundreds of years old, wonderfully carved altars, and the building itself is baroque and Moorish-styled. Admission includes a tour, which was very rushed, and we wished that we had had more time to appreciate the place. Next stop was back at the Plaza de Armas, where we caught the end of the changing of the guards in front of the government palace. The police had blocked off all the roads leading into the plaza, and weren’t allowing anyone to go near the fountain in the centre of the plaza. When we asked what was going on, they told us that it was security for a demonstration that was going to happen later in the day. We hung around for a little while to see what was going on, but we didn’t want to stand there all day so we left and walked down the pedestrial mall (Jiron Union), which ends at Plaza San Martin. We stopped and had lunch at Norky’s chicken place, and we also stopped at a pharmacy to get some medication for my cough. After punching all my symptoms into her computer, the pharmacist gave me a three-set of some mystery pills that were supposed to cure me in three days. I sure hope so!

Plaza San Martin is also surrounded by beautiful colonial buildings and in the centre of the plaza is of course a statue of General Jose San Martin, Peru’s liberator. Underneath the big statue is another statue of Madre Patria, who amusingly has a small llama on her head due to a misunderstanding on the part of the people in Spain who made the statue. Apparently the word for flame in Spanish is also “llama”. Someone had a sense of humour though and put up the statue anyways, llama and all.

On the way back to the hotel we stopped at a huge Metro supermarket, and amused ourselves by walking around drooling over all the fancy foods that we hadn’t seen in a couple of months. We even found some Kraft Dinner! We decided to come back tomorrow to shop for the groceries we will need for our trek near Huaraz. We also treated ourselves to some nice toilet paper and real Kleenex. It is amazing the little things that make you happy when you are travelling! After relaxing at the hotel for a few minutes we went out for dinner and ended up eating at a fairly expensive restaurant on the plaza. We mistakenly ordered too much food and neither of us could finish our meals. Lincoln had ceviche again and I had criollo fish, which was good.