The night we travelled to Lima, Heathrow airspace had been closed
After a gentle lie-in, we took breakfast in the hotel. I had tamales, Peruvian cornmeal pasties with chicken and olives inside - a bit like polenta, and really strong, dark coffee mixed with hot milk and a sachet of stevia to sweeten it. The hotel had a nice feel to it, with old gadgets, scales, irons, dotted around, and a pleasant lounge and bar with old chairs and large bottles of pisco brandy infused with various fruits. We won't taste pisco until we get to Cusco after the Inca Trail, on our group leader's recommendation.
Our group leader is called Wilbert, an unusual name... He speaks Spanish, but clearly - people on the coast speak the traditional sort of garbled Spanish which is difficult to follow. He also speaks Quechua and Japanese!
We took a walk around the pleasant area of Miraflores, with pretty old houses and interesting looking restaurants. In the ocean we could see a few people surfing, but otherwise the coast had a quiet feel to it. We popped into a shopping mall on the side of the cliffs, and sat in Parque 7 de Junio, surrounded by happily sleeping cats.
Our guide for the afternoon was Enrique, given to interesting factoids about Peru (the oldest vineyards in South America! 850 species of potato!). He took us to the city centre, and we looked at the Plaza Mayor, and met four girls who shyly practised their English (and asked us to write their names in our book) and had photos taken with Nina, the blond woman in our group. We walked past the old Desamparados station, which I had seen on TV when I was a child but which was closed in the 1980s when the daily train service into the Andes finished.
Finally we visited the San Francisco Church and Monastery. The church had very ornate but dark art, and was enlivened by preparations for a wedding (with an immaculately dressed lady talking at top of her voice on her mobile). The Monastery was built in 1620 and we admired the ornate tiling and carving, a fantastic old library with great natural light (not great for the books) - a couple of large books were on display, the courtyard with fruit trees, and huge catacombs with mostly femur bones and skulls.
In the evening we sat outside with the group and I enjoyed beefsteak and tried my first beef heart (texture a bit like liver, but tasted otherwise of strong beef). And after some detailed bill calculations with the waiter, and leaving the others to go to the Irish bar (without any Irish beer, apparently...) we fell into bed.
No comments:
Post a Comment