Out of Lima to Trujillo and beyond

Saturday, March 1st Lima, Peru

The past two days have been spent wandering around Lima and seeing a few of the popular sites for visitors.

Yesterday morning I woke up to the sounds of birds chirping in the courtyard of our hostel, and thought, now this is a real special place that they have a garden in the courtyard that attracts song birds every morning. Then I realized that I am in the middle of downtown Lima, a city of 8 million people, not exactly the jungle or rural by any means so where did these song birds fly in from. I walked outside to realize that they had caged several song birds and an owl to sing to the guests every morning as the woke up. Definitely different than the USA...

After seeing a famous monastery yesterday morning in Downtown Lima and a few other of their famous sights, I made my way over to DHL to mail some items back to the US.

Seeing as Stewart was coming today, and had a bag no bigger than a school back pack, I have spent the last three days trying to figure out what I could loose. I mean seriously Stewart is carrying like 10 pounds of stuff for 3 months! So I’ve got my backpack of 38 pounds measured at the airport, and I’m feeling a little like my mom who always overpacks, just kidding!. But I mean come on, three months, there is no telling what we are going to encounter? Nonetheless I went down to the South American Explorers club here and dropped off a pair of pants, 4 pairs of socks, 2 pairs of underwear, electric razor, extra deodorant, and two t-shirts, which will all be given to foreign prisoners currently in Peruvian prisons (mostly on drug charges). I mailed home(DHL), a jacket, Camera flash, and extra ipod cord (don’t know how that got in there?). And STILL my bag trumps his by 2-3 times the size.

After DHL was finished I looked at the map and saw that I was relatively close to where I was staying and figured I might walk back. After about an hour of walking through a nice up-scale neighborhood called SanIsidrio, I looked again at my map and realized that I had mistook one plaza called Ovalo for another called Ovalo Gutierrez, and then realized I had another hour of two of walking. Well, by this time I had already committed an hour to walking, and was bound and determined to make it home by foot. Two hours and 6 miles later I finally reached my hostel after 4 hours of walking and many miles, so it is fair to say that I have seen a good portion of Lima.

The hike traversed about all that can be considered Rich Lima. Along the way I got to walk past all the major embassies in Lima. For anyone who has spent much time in foreign countries you can probably agree that it is amusing to walk past a bunch of embassies at once. It is kind of like being at Epcot in Disney world, because every stereotype that you can think of is packed into one long stretch of space, one after the other. Por ejemplo: British (and ex British countries) all have a Victorian Facade with a quaint garden in the front, security guards are all dressed in red or something. All Russian, and ex-soviet bloc countries have a crumbling 1960s modern facade, and haven’t been washed in several years. All Chinese embassies have a similar 1960s facade, just as ugly, but with a little more upkeep since they have more money. American embassies tend to be over the top, 4 times as big as any other embassy, and have a wall twice as high surrounding the place (in Quito, they are building a brand new embassy ¨complex¨ outside of the city, because the 6 city blocks that currently held the embassy were too small) I mean Come ON! Does the US really have that much to do in Ecuador? Egypt has an all white plain facade with deep set windows just like you imagine building to look in Egypt. The other South American and Latin American embassies tend to have uncharacteristically nice embassies, I think due in large part to the close relationships they have. The Canadian Embassy is modern yet stylish with neo-European flair, and very, very, cold looking

Yesterday while walking past all these embassies, all of which have impressive looking security guards standing out front, the one with the biggest guns was... Colombia, by far. I was walking with my head down and almost bumped into this 6 foot tall Colombian carrying an Israeli made Uzi, hand on the trigger, and get this: a foot long silencer! WHAT the heck?

So with Stewart here today we have been planning out our attack for the next week and half. Here is the plan : We leave this evening at 9:00pm for Trujillo, a desert city a couple hundred klics up on coast. Arriving into the city at 5:00am tomorrow morning, we are possibly going to check out the ruins of Chan Chan (once the largest city in the Americas between 100 and 1000 AD) before we catch a five hour bus inland to Cajamarca. This smaller colonial town is up in the Andes at about 8,000 feet. Highlights include neighboring famous thermal Inca baths, Gold mines, a room that once held the famous Incan king Atahualpa prisoner, and where he offered Fracisco Piazarro to fill the room up in gold and silver twice in return for his release (Atahualpa was subsequently killed). But Cajamarca is just a stop on the way to even smaller Celedin. This town in the middle of nowhere Andes has a population of 10,000, at about the same elevation 5 hours more into the Andes. This is where we hope to catch a bus to Chachapoyas, but the road is often taken out by mudslides, so we will see. This route to from Celedin to Chachapoyas is truly the road less traveled, reports tell of locals staring at white skinned foreigners, for they don’t see them often. It is supposed to be one of the most spectacular and white knuckle rides of your life as the old rickety bus hugs the side of the Andean mountains through 11,000 foot passes. It takes 14 hours to go 90 miles, which says a little of the type of topography we will be dealing with. Once we hopefully make it to Chachapoyas, outside of the city are ruins that reportedly rival Machu Picchu in terms of size, with more stone than was used to build the pyramids. They are not as famous due to the current inaccessibility described

From Chachapoyas we are going to make our way north from Jaen, Peru into Ecuador through a border entrance that just opened a few years ago after the Peruvian/Ecuadorian war was over. This path is also not traveled much at all, and will take a whole day and several different bus changes to get to Ecuador, but supposedly if you leave Jaen at daybreak you can make it to Ecuador by nighttime. So we will see!

M3