Pain Below the Equator
Page 8
hundred times as many.
February 27, 2010 Leaving Lima:
Our flight departed Lima a one-thirty Monday morning. The choice between keeping the hotel room for another day or keeping Cristián was vexing. The cost was about the same and we wanted to visit some other parts of town, but it would also have been nice to shower and change clothes before beginning the aerial marathon. Ultimately we opted for Cristián’s cab.
His cab ran on natural gas and he said that most cars in Peru did. I watched as he put gas into it and noted that it was a normal engine with a special carburetor—I think it was a Japanese car. I had to admire the Peruvians for the prevalence of natural gas fired vehicles because it is practically non-polluting and they have plenty of it. We also have abundant natural gas in the United States but we prefer to bitch about pollution and give money to Arabs.
At the palace we saw the changing of the guard, though it baffled us. The band played and the troops marched, but the guards remained the same. It went on and on for about forty-five minutes in the rather intense sun. Next we toured the catacombs at the church of San Francisco. Sandy couldn’t keep her thoughts away from earthquakes. I thought the mountains of bones were cool.
We lunched in an ancient bar. They had pictures of the place dated 1905. In the men’s room was an old sign admonishing patrons not to urinate outside the bowl. Some advice is timeless. Sandy maintained that our waiter was in the 1905 photograph and this gave Cristián a great laugh. He ordered some purple stuff in small pitchers and told us it was a popular drink that is made from purple corn. I found it lacking in interest and can’t remember what it’s called, but Sandy found it noteworthy only because the glass that she used to sample it had a little water standing in the bottom and twenty-four hours later she developed a trace of dysentery.
After lunch we drove to Pachacámac, a ruin on the coast south of the city. It is pre-Inca and noteworthy because of its odd microclimate. Of course the southern Peruvian coast is one of the driest places on earth, rivers of Andean melt water and modern irrigation disguised the aridity until we entered the archaeological zone. Even though we could feel the moisture from the sea and it is bordered by a banana plantation, Pachacámac is completely devoid of vegetation. The buildings are adobe with stone embellishments and are spread over a relatively huge area. I don’t recall its dates, but being pre-Inca must make it over a thousand years old and in that millennium there has not been sufficient rain to obliterate the mud bricks. An American woman offered to take our picture. We told her that we had enough pictures of ruins.
It seemed as though the sun had stopped in the sky. I was tired of entertaining Cristián and wanted to get out of the taxi. In Lima all roads lead to Miraflores. No matter where we went inevitably we found ourselves back in the neighborhood of the Hotel Jose Antonio, and before we knew where he was taking us, that's where Cristián put us. This time in a seaside bar where we watched the sun slink below the cloudbank while our driver napped in the car. Around nine o’clock we let him take us to the airport and get on with his life.
Tom Robbins said that South America is “just so damned vivid”. Well, perhaps, but not everywhere. Much of it is pedestrian and just so damned ordinary. We found Buenos Aires to be not much different from Mexico City, and Santiago much too much like Los Angeles; while southern Chile was a great deal like the Alaskan panhandle. Easter Island stands at the top of everything we saw by a wide margin. Peru was interesting but the debacle with Machu Picchu cast a pall over our time there and turned into a battle with Auto Club that lasted for six months. I had an email from the tour company that AAA used promising a full refund but what they considered a full refund was about a third of the value of the services that we prepaid and didn't receive. Plus, they added insult to injury by sending a two-hundred dollar gift certificate redeemable on the next trip that we booked with them. I returned it with a testy note advising that it would be a cold day in hell before we took another trip with them.
In our defense, not being rookie travelers, I should explain that what we wanted was somebody to do the leg work of securing hotel reservations on arrival in each destination, the cruise which we dumbly thought was a good way to get from Buenos Aires to Valparaíso while seeing some scenery along the way, the trip to Easter Island and a couple days at Machu Picchu. The mantra we continually heard from the travel agent was, "It's cheaper to book it through a tour company." We won't make that mistake again.
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