LIMA

We had a lovely time in Miami before taking an afternoon flight to Lima. The flight was delayed by 2 hours, but since we were flying internationally in business class we took advantage of the lounge’s amenities. We arrived late in Lima and were faced with a crowd.

This was the beginning of the crowd awaiting entrance to the large room leading to immigration; it took about an hour to pass through. By then it was midnight and we were tired. Fortunately the ride service Pat arranged was there holding up a sign for us. We then “enjoyed” a rollicking midnight ride apparently ungoverned by traffic rules. Pedestrians were fair game. And there were plenty of pedestrians even at this hour. The city seems busy with people all the time.

The next morning we met Mirabelle, our local guide who took us on a driving and walking tour of Lima. Mirabelle was not an employee of Overseas Adventure Travel, our tour operator. Instead there are rules in some areas prohibiting anyone but authorized tour guides to operate in those areas. We ran into this in Morocco too; it is something like the requirement to use a local pilot to bring ships into harbor.

Lima has a population of 12 million, about a third of the whole country. We were told by two different guides that the economic and political crises of the 1980’s brought many, many families from the mountains to Lima for safety and thus caused a major swelling of the city’ population. We staying in the Miraflores district, one of dozens of city districts each with their own mayor; the mayor of Lima is the mayor of the mayors. Miraflores is one of the affluent districts but the air quality was not good.

Lima and this part of Peru is a desert, receiving very little rain; with the swollen population, water is becoming a serious problem.

Downtown is one of the oldest sections of the city. The main square has been closed off by police to keep demonstrators from disrupting the park activities. This is an odd position to take as the police were everywhere in strong numbers; this was very disruptive to activity in the square. This is a police squad deploying to the town center.

We didn’t feel intimidated by the police presence, although when turning a corner unexpectedly,,,

Some of the local vultures show little respect for authority.

We had a few nice walks along Avenida Larco, one of the main streets through Miraflores that runs all the way down to the beach. Kennedy Park is clean and well lit.

It is famous for caring for stray cats, as in this kitty enclave right next to the main pathway.

We had a wonderful meal in a well-appointed restaurant downtown. Lima has some of the world’s finest restaurants. When we asked our concierge to make a reservation at one, he laughed saying reservations are many months out.

Cusco

We left our hotel in Lima at 6:30 for our ninety minute flight to Cusco. Another agent met us and secured our boarding passes and luggage tags. The Lima airport is crowded and everyone speaks Spanish!

Cusco is at 11,000 feet in elevation. We were given altitude adjustment pills to start taking the day before, twice per day. I was hesitant about taking them, but two friends who frequent high elevations convinced me to take them. I took one the day before and decided not to take the second, they are diuretics and therefore inconvenient. Pat took her doses. I did not fare well in Cusco; I felt a bit dizzy (yes, more than normal) and bloated and uncomfortable. Pat was fine.

Our Andes guide, Cesar Nunez, grew up near Cusco. Before acting as a guide, which he has done for 19 years, he worked for many years on the Inca trail, guiding tourists as well as carrying their supplies. He thought he might have done the trail(s) (there are many) as many as 500 times.

He has studied the Inca and pre-Inca history at college and on his own. He gives us impassioned talks about the history. One interesting fact that I hadn’t heard is that when the Spanish arrived in the Inca Empire in the 1600’s, the two groups got along just fine for the first three years. Then things changed.

One of the intriguing and impressive aspects of Aztec culture was their architecture and construction. At the time, the Inca (the word Inca means King, by the way) had no hard metals, so all the very hard stones used in construction were cut and ground using other stones. The seams are impressive.

Eventually the Spanish destroyed some of the Aztec structures and built their own buildings and churches on the same sites. In 1950 Peru had a serious earthquake that toppled almost all the Spanish churches. None of the Aztec buildings were damaged. The explanation has to do with the angle of the buildings and the fine joints that were held together only by their precision crafting, no mortar was used. The TransAmerica building in San Francisco employed the same pyramidal construction as a defense against earthquake damage.

Cusco has a population of 1 million, with 500,000 in the city proper and the balance on the outskirts. This area has two seasons, dry and wet. Guess which one is now.

Baby llamas are hard to resist. J couldn’t. These folks earn a living out of cuteness.

Urubamba and the Sacred Valley

We are spending two nights in a lovely park-like hotel in Urubamba. We were greeted by Rosa, who makes all these beautiful pieces out of Alpaca and other materials. She is a lovely person who supports her family by selling to tourists. We helped out her family and she was very appreciative and emotional. It was a heart-warming exchange.

I still felt poorly in the first evening, by morning I was not functioning well. For example, I play a word game called Spelling Bee in the NYT every day. The idea is to come up with words from seven letters provided. I usually avoid four and five letter words to start and go for the more complex words; this morning 5 letters was my max. I was bumbling around enough that I decided to try the medication. There was no way I even considered writing a blog. I have also been drinking coca leaf tea; it’s supposed to help with altitude orientation. By late morning something worked and I was back to normal.

In the late morning we went to an Inca site at Ollantaytambo. It is a magnificent location. The Inca’s built a temple to the Sun God here that is oriented to the Solstices and Equinoxes. Again, they used large cut stones to build the temple, the stairs, terraces for agriculture, storage buildings and more. The Spanish destroyed much of the temple in an attempt to crush the Inca religion and replace it with their own.

The current city still has much of Inca design and construction. Notice the irrigation channel running down the street. Many streets had these, built by the Inca’s to irrigate the crops below from the snow melt coming down the mountains. The uneven stone streets were not one of the Inca’s designs. You can see the foundations made of the finely cut Inca stone supporting most of these current buildings.

Everywhere local artisans and mountain people were selling their creations.

We had come to climb the 200 stairs to the remains of the Temple of the Sun. At 9000 feet the notion was daunting. Cesar, the man with 500 Inca Trail hikes under his belt, took us up very slowly and with frequent rests. It made it a fairly easy task. Along the way he gave us talks in his wonderfully animated way. You can see the steeply sloped valley behind him.

Everywhere we marveled at the skill, the patience of the ancients. They must have had a very different sense of time than we do to undertake projects that would take many decades to complete. Look at the joints below – oh yes, and Pat, too.

Who builds in this environment? Who hauls very heavy stones for miles and cuts them into perfect seems?

Today, there are many entrepreneurs trying to make a living in many ways, including through tourism. Here’s one that may not last if Starbucks ever gets wind of this. The logo looks kind of similar.