Home sweet home

My time in Lima was, well, somewhat uninspiring.

Lima is a difficult city to navigate. There is no subway; there are no organized, documented, bus routes. Taxis are risky; gringos are likely to be scammed, and you have to negotiate prices. I had arranged transport to the hotel ahead of time (the round trip costing more than one night's hotel room), and the driver described how people were often charged as much as $100 for what should be a $10-15 ride.

This is the cost of not preparing (knowing what things ought to cost).

I walked from the hotel in the upscale, fairly safe, Miraflores area of Lima to nearby San Isidro, where there is a pre-Inca ruin called Huaca Huallamarca. This is basically a first-millenium pyramid made of mud bricks. The guide did a good job describing the site and its uses, as a political and religious center of the peoples there at time.

From there I went on what turned into a longer-than-intended walk up to the center of Lima. I should have taken a bus, but the bus system is confusing. Buses have locations, which are usually street names, but sometimes place names, printed on them. If you know where the roads go, you can know which bus to take to get where you're going. I was a bit gun-shy, so decided to walk. And walk. And walk. After 1+ hour, I reached Lima's Museo des Artes, which features some pre-Columbian pottery, textiles, and metal work, and a larger array of paintings from the colonial period to modern times. Lighting was not always great, and there were spotty English descriptions of the older stuff.

Another 40 minutes of walking, which included passing by some nice colonial architecture, brought me to the center of Lima, the Plaza de Armas, which is the typical Latin main square, full of bustle, and a surrounded by old buildings.

A few short blocks from the plaza is the Monastery of San Francisco, which reminded very much of things that I saw in Spain last year, except more run-down. Tile work (probably using tile from Spain) and woodwork were very similar to the Old World things I saw. The neat part of the tour was the catacombs, where archaeologists have cataloged bodies going all the way back to the early colonial days -- the monastery crypt was one of the first burial grounds of the colony.

Back near the plaza, I finally decided to brave the buses and caught a bus that dropped me (after about 45 diesel-choked minutes) near my hotel.

The next day (yesterday!) brought an early start to reach the airport, and an uneventful pair of flights home.

There's no place like home.