Sept 21 - Sept 22
Elevation 354 ft

Cuzco to machu picchu pueblo

Taxi - Ollantamtaybo to Cuzco

LAN 020 - Cuzco to Lima
Departs Tuesday, Sep. 21 - 12:20 PM
Arrives Tuesday, Sep. 21 - 1:40 PM

Monday, September 20

So we arrive in Lima a day early. Our Lima hotel has a driver waiting for us at the airport. We start our trek to the hotel which is in the southern suburb of Barranco. The taxi driver gets all chatty with Doug in Spanish not realizing that Doug is only picking up only a fraction of what he’s actually saying. The traffic in Lima is complete chaos. There are about 8 million people here in Lima. It’s a very densely packed city and there are cars everywhere. Our driver is very good. He’s very patient and cool under pressure.

Barranco was developed at the turn of the 20th century and has some pretty cool looking buildings. It’s primarily residential with a little bit of business mixed in. Our hotel is ultra-modern. It’s a totally concrete building, but it has good security and free WiFi, so we like it a lot. We get to our hotel without incident and unpack (we have a serious need to sort through things since we packed up so hastily back at The Green House). We get some recommendations for dinner from the desk and we head out to the major restaurant area on foot.

Lima is a very unusual place compared to where we’ve been so far. Lima must have a high crime rate because there are national police and private security all over the place. We’ve been warned by people and by guidebooks and by travel articles to be very cautious. On the way to the hotel, even the taxi driver made a point to lock all of the car doors. Even as we drive along the sea-wall on the way to the hotel, there are National Police with machine guns patrolling along the beach. The hotel clerk says the Barranco area is fine.

We decide on pizza and walk by the restaurant once and realize we’ve gone too far and turn back. We order pizza and it’s really good! We head back to the hotel for the night.

Tuesday, September 21

We get up the next morning, have breakfast at the hotel (they actually employ someone to cook breakfast for the guests) and chart out our day of sightseeing. We want to go to one of the museums, Museo Larco, and to the Monastery de San Francisco to see the catacombs. The desk clerk convinces us to go to the monastery by bus and take a taxi to the museum and then back to the hotel.

There’s a main Lima bus line that must be new. It runs along the side of the highway and could easily be turned into a rail system. It’s very organized and clean. We have to buy metro cards to get on the bus and we have a little bit of confusion on how to do this with the machine. A young security guard comes up and sees we need help and shows us how to use the machine (they only have the instructions in Spanish). We get on the next bus. It’s 10:30 am, yet the bus is packed. It feels like rush hour, but we think it’s a little late for that.

We arrive at Central Station and then figure out how to navigate our way to the monastery. Have we mentioned how chaotic traffic is and that horns honk all of the time? We play a little game on the way to see what the longest period of time is between horn honks that we hear. We only got up to 25 seconds (but Doug still won’t believe it took that long). We arrive at the Plaza de Armas. Surrounding the plaza is La Catedral, the Archbishop’s Palace, the Presidential Palace and many other nice yellow painted impressive buildings (yellow seems to be Lima’s main color). The monastery we’re going to is down the street. While we’re here, we take a moment to read our travel guide. We realize that there is a “changing of the guards” at noon and that’s only about 30 minutes from now. We go buy cokes and wait for a while. Earlier we noticed protesters in the area and we see that there are a lot of national police around the plaza, some with full riot gear. Hmmmmm. South American country. Protesters. Military Police. Riot Gear. That’s not a good combination however you look at it, but it can’t be too bad. There are school groups all over the place. We develop a plan just to hide behind the kids. We finally see the military police to into action and run across the plaza toward where the protesters were. We later found out that they blocked them a few blocks away from the Presidental Palace and were doing a good job of keeping them contained. We think that they’ve had a lot of practice at doing this. The protesters bring along bullhorns and musical instruments and try to disrupt the changing of the guards ceremony because you can hear them occasionally.

The changing of the guards event starts to occur. It’s a unique event. First of all, the guards are dressed in blue and red uniforms slightly akin to what you would imagine the French Foreign Legion wearing. Then the band comes out. That’s right, a band. A full marching band, all in the same blue and red uniforms. They start playing and marching. They’re really quite good. Some more of the guards come out and march around and they eventually change places. The guards are not nearly as good as the band and need some choreography practice (their goose steps are slightly out of alignment). The band plays some more. The entire procession lasts 30 minutes, and they do this every day! One of the marches that they play is El Condor Pasa (the condor passes) which Simon & Garfunkel turned into a song in 1970. Doug recognizes the song (go figure!). We later look up the march/song and read about its interesting history.

We finally can’t take any more of the ceremony and head off to the monastery.

We arrive and wait around a bit for an English speaking tour guide. The monastery was built in 1774 and contains 3 level of catacombs underneath it. It is estimated that there are somewhere between 25,000-40,000 skeletons contained within it. A lot of the bones have long since disintegrated, so they don’t exactly know the true number and there weren’t exactly any records except for the really important people. It looks like huge piles of old dusty bones to us. The monastery is quite interesting. They have a very old library and a lot of paintings, but no climate control. The books look like they’re falling apart. The building has survived many earthquakes and has a few leaning walls. We’re told that the walls are made of bamboo and are quite flexible and everything is quite alright (the guide calls it anti-seismic!). The place is in need of a lot of repair, but how often does one get to tour through a bunch of old catacombs.

From here, we need to make our way to Museo Larco by taxi and we need lunch. We head back toward the Plaza de Armas to take some more pictures and we guess that we can catch a taxi from here. We find a really old restaurant – from 1905 and we have some really good grilled fish that came with some incredibly hot sauce that we both try but give up on actually adding it to our fish.

We find a taxi and get in. We tell him we want to go to Museo Larco (it’s the second most popular attraction in Lima) and he has no idea where it is. Doug finds it in the tour book and then passes it over the protective cage to him and he starts looking at maps while talking to himself (and driving!) and then finally figures things out. We buy tickets and then we’re asked if we want a guide (remember our experience in Cusco with independent guides – that must be the way things are dine in Peru). We get a guide and he does a really good job summarizing things and tying everything together. It’s a fantastic museum! It goes through pottery, textiles, and metals from the pre-Incan times to the conquest. They have things broken up by region, so you can actually see how the artwork and methods have progressed through time as different regions and cultures have merged. They have a HUGE collection of pottery, and we mean HUGE!!! They have 44,000 pieces of pottery that are kept in huge cases which aren’t even in the regular museum’s collection – they have to be categorized by things like animals, birds, vegetables, etc. They even have one category for medical ailments (no joke!) They also have an erotic gallery (you can check out the photo gallery section on the museum website if you want to take a look - they're not too scandalous!). We go back through it on our own briefly to take pics and then need to take a taxi to get back to the hotel.

We get in the taxi and he drives a block and asks us where we want to go. The hotel gave us a couple of their business cards that even has a map on the back just for this occasion. We give it to the driver. He studies it for a moment and then basically says that either he doesn’t know where it is or he just won’t take us there. So we get out and get another taxi. We get in and present the card and he takes off. About 10 minutes later he pulls up to an address and presents us with our destination which is not our destination at all. We tell him “no” and he studies the card for a bit more and then finally realizes he’s way off and quotes us a price which is okay. We start to pick up on a major traffic thing – the side streets don’t have stop signs or lights. There must be some known rule about what car would have right-of-way, but we certainly can’t figure it out. Think bumper cars, but no one actually hits each other. How do you say “scared” in Spanish?

We arrive at our hotel without physical incident. We take some time to work on the website and then finally go out for dinner. We go back to the restaurant area and take a gamble on restaurants. As it turns out, we end up in a traditional family restaurant and we order skewer chicken and potatoes. It’s really good.

We also start to notice something about Lima. Nothing here has air conditioning or heat. Even the restaurant is an open air restaurant. And come to think of it, our hotel doesn’t have any either. We start doing a little bit of climate research of Lima. It’s odd. It’s on the Pacific Coast and is cloudy most of the time (you may have noticed from our pics), is humid, and has very little temperature variation with the average high being 71.8 deg F and the average low being 62.1 deg F. They only get a half inch of rain a year. That helps explain things. It’s as if Los Angeles and San Francisco merged together in the desert.

We go to bed. Get up. Eat breakfast and finally get the Sacred Valley leg published on the website. We’re heading to Nazca and take a taxi to get to the bus station. Luckily this taxi driver knows where he is going.

You’ll have to wait for our next update to see what we ended up doing in Nazca.