The company I am working with arranged 2 tours for me during the weekend so I didn't really have to plan what to do on either Saturday or Sunday. This is probably a good thing as Lima is a big city that is also confusing as to which areas are safe or not. I know that Miraflores, where my hotel and the Larcomar mall are is safe and a couple other districts nearby are also supposed to be reasonably ok but I am fairly certain this is a city where you can easily turn down the wrong road by accident.
My tour was supposed to pick me up between 9 and 9:30am so I having to be perpetually early headed down to the lobby at 8:50 because they said to be in the lobby. While I was downstairs Daniela came over to greet me. She was to accompany me on both days' tours. She works for the tourism industry and her job through these two tour is to evaluate the tours for how good they are. So I sort of gained an unofficial escort throughout the process. I am not sure how they arranged it but it turned out that it worked pretty well. We talked for a few minutes before the bus came to pick us up and then it was on to the first tour of the day. They took us to El Parque del Amor, The Park of Love, in Miraflores first. The guide was a youngish girl but she spoke English well and perform the tour in both English and Spanish. She was very knowledgeable and pleasant throughout the whole tour. The park is patterned after styles from Barcelona with a lot of mosaic tiled little walls with saying on them. In the center is a gigantic, awful looking statue of two lovers in embrace. It is traditional for Peruvians (or at least those from Lima) to go their after their wedding and have their picture taken in front of the statue for a good luck in their marriage. The park is also near a bridge that they had to put up big protective walls because many people have fallen from the bridge and died. According to Daniela they used to bungee jump from the bridge and she evaluated those tours as well, meaning she did the bungee jumping. Much braver than I am.
From there we moved on to Huaca Pucllana which is a Liman pre Inca ruins that was uncovered in the city. It is one of only two surviving in the city at all and I visited both today. The place is pretty much fenced off so you really can't get into it and there are not many good spots for pictures but basically they are pyramidal ruins that are made of adobe bricks in what they call the library style, which means that the bricks are positioned vertically. They have a bit of space in between them as well to help absorb the shock of earthquakes and tremors which are the only real disasters in this region (maybe tsunami but still related when you get down to it). The visit was fairly short. From there we took a ride to the center of Lima in which we learned about the district of Chorillos and a bit more Lima history. From there we saw the Plaza Mayor or the central square. Much like in Cusco, on the square you will see the main cathedral and the city hall. The presidential palace and the archbishop's palace are both situated on the main square as well. Daniela was very proud when all the tourists on the bus said, "Wow," as we drove into the square. From there we walked to the San Francisco Church and first visited the monastery which led us to the catacombs which had thousands and thousands of bones in it. They estimate that there are 25000 people buried in the catacombs. Daniela was very bothered by the catacombs. She said she was in it as a schoolgirl because they are required to do those kind of tours for cultural reasons and there were indeed lots of school tours today, but that she didn't like it then and now. She was very bothered by the bones and the smell of all the lime. I could see how nervous she was instantly. She started to break out on her hands a little bit and I think it was the nerves that caused it though I didn't say so to her. I did tease her about being able to bungee jump but not to stand in a catacombs. After the catacombs we went back up to the San Francisco Church for a few minutes and then the tour was basically over and we were driven to Larcomar.
Daniela stayed with me and lunch was provided in a restaurant in Larcomar called Mangos. The food was buffet but it was very good. I sampled several things including a very freshly made ceviche and a cooked cold mussel appetizer type thing served on shell as a salad. It was also very tasty. We were given chicha (not sure how to spell it still) and pisco sours too. After a couple rounds of food we went for dessert. We chatted the whole time we were eating and it turns out she's quite traveled. Working with tourism she has worked on a lot of cruises and been to a lot of places but she also travels personally as well. We discussed places we have been and liked for a large part of the day.
After lunch we were picked up by the tour company again for the second tour of the day which would bring us to Barranco first to see one of the old resort districts of the city. It is now a moderately wealthy area still if I understood correctly but there is a fishing village as well. The train that used to operate in Lima has a small museum in Barranco as well as their being a cathedral that was ruined in one of their earthquakes many years ago. Instead of rebuilding it they made a new one. It was an interesting little area. From there we started to drive out to Pachacamac which is the other ruins you can visit near Lima. You have to take the trans-American highway a short distance to get there. Along this road we saw a lot of the shanty towns on the hill just on the edge of the city of Peru. These towns were apparently formed right on top of a giant sand dune during the 70s and 80s when Peru was beset by locally instigated terrorists who wanted to introduce a dictatorship to the nation under their control. Many people moved from the highlands to the city of Lima to escape the terrorism. During that time many Peruvian professionals also moved out of Peru to escape. The problem with the local issue is that there are many people piled onto a giant mountain of sand that is actually filled with things that can cause them disease and is also very susceptible to earthquakes and tremors. I of course do not try to take pictures from bus windows anymore but I did get to take pictures of one area near the ruins that was similar though the buildings appeared to be much more well built.
The ruins of Pachacamac are much larger than the Huaca Pucllana and date through several different pre Incan cultures through to the Incans as well. Since there is not the same make up of earth around there the ruins were more made of adobe even in the Incan times so they didn't look a lot like what I saw in the highlands on my last trip to Peru. The ruins were in the process of being made more touristy it was obvious. We drove through the grounds in the bus which was probably for the best as it was a very large site. Not that I couldn't walk it but it would have taken a long time to get through it. We did see the places were human sacrifices were made (always women the guide Andres said) and where they were kept and prepared to be sacrificed. The sacrificial area was the sun temple though it paled in comparison to Machu Picchu's sun temple. The preparation area for the sacrifices was the best looking part of the ruins having been restored in the 1940s. It looked the most like Incan ruins but we could only see it from a distance and I fear the poor location of the sun really kept us from getting good pictures of it all the same. At least it is possible to see the trapezoidal windows that make very obvious that it is Inca construction. Overall the tour was good though the van was very hot and we were grateful for the time outside of it for the nice fresh air. Even though Pachacamac is near the ocean it is technically in desert area. There is a river valley right near it also so there is green on once side and blue on the other, but the entire area of ruins is sand.
After the Pachacamac visit we were driven back to town where we were dropped off in Miraflores and after a small walk around I parted ways with Daniela for the evening and headed back to the hotel to freshen up then head back out to find dinner. I again walked down to Larcomar and decided to eat at Cafe Cafe once more. So far it was my favorite dinner time meal in Lima and I hoped they could provide something good again. I didn't want anything complicated and decided to eat a Pizza Wolf which had sausage, pepperoni and salami as well as Tabasco. I accompanied that with a couple Cuscenas. The pizza was actually quite good and it didn't really take me too long to finish it. When I was settled up I headed back to the room but found a place that sells candies and other junk on the way back that had not been opened before and decided to buy a handful of things to much on for the week. I am not sure why they were open on Saturday but I didn't see them any other day. By the way, in case you hadn't guessed my stomach/intestinal problem appears to have been very short lived as it did not repeat after the one instance so far. I will not complain.
The pictures from today are located here.
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