SOUTH AMERICA 2008--Days 1 - 2 (Wichita, Kansas, to Lima, Peru)
By Michael Farrell
A few coordinates
are entered in red
for any geeks who
might want to look
places up on Google
Earth.
´Hola´ de la Plaza Mayor, Lima, Peru
Day 1: Wichita to Lima
It seems that I was particularly on edge before I embarked on this trip to South America. It was my sixth overall, the third to Peru, and I should have been more at ease. Perhaps knowing a little about what lay ahead contributed to a case of nerves: who is more sanguine, the man going in for his first transurethral resection or the man going in for his second?
I had scheduled this trip months ago, and begun preparing in earnest a week or more ago. But I live on a precipice. I didn´t receive an acknowledgement from my lodging of choice--Hotel Espana (www.hotelespanaperu.com.pe , Jr. Azángaro 105, Lima) until literally five minutes before I pulled the plug on my laptop for the last time prior to leaving for the airport.
At the airport I was held at the Continental Airlines gate until five standby passengers were accommodated and then, at 10:30 a.m., I was told that I would not get a seat. I turned immediately to rush to the far side of the airport where Delta Airlines had a flight to Atlanta that I knew I could get on if I could just get there before their 10:45 departure. As soon as I started, though, the Continental gate agent called me back: one passenger had not shown up at the gate and if he didn´t show up after one last paging over the airport intercom, I could have that last open seat. My luck held. I boarded the flight to a light round of applause a few of the other standby passengers who thought I´d been left behind.
I would have made it to Lima, most likely, even if I´d had to depart Wichita on Delta rather than Continental, but there would have been an extra connection to make and my arrival in Lima would have been eight hours later after an overnight flight from Miami.
I was seated next to a friendly young man (mid-to-late 30´s?) named Mike Jennings on the flight to Houston. He works for Frontier Oil Corporation out of Houston and was returning home after working (financial, not technical) at the company´s refinery in El Dorado. Mike´s father had grown up in Hutchinson, studied medicine, and is an orthopedic surgeon in Great Falls, Montana. Mike graduated high school there, then went to college at Dartmouth (New Hampshire) and got an MBA at the University of Chicago. Not a lot of slacking going on in that family...
We talked the whole trip, much of the conversation about the refining business. (Bet you didn´t know that the standard barrel of oil traces its 42-gallon volume to the days when oil was shipped out of Pennsylvania on carts in open 50-gallon drums. To account for spillage during transport of the oil over bumpy back roads, 42 gallons was settled upon as an equitable figure for accounting purposes that would be acceptable to both buyer and seller.) We talked about gas, of course, which was selling for the (up to then) unprecedented price of $3.49 per gallon. I learned a lot about what happens to a barrel of oil as it is refined into gas, diesel fuel, butane, and asphalt.
Mike expressed undisguised disdain for our President´s energy policy that has little more than a few ethanol plants, and commensurate escalation in price of nearly everything in the food chain, to show for it. He feels that market forces will drive both conservation and technological advances. Don´t count on a Manhattan Project or paradigm shift to deliver us from our unholy dependence on oil.
I was in the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston for three hours. Still antsy, I couldn´t focus on writing, or even reading. I managed to get in touch with Lan Peru Airlines and get myself listed for a couple of flights within Peru. I had lunch and called some credit card issuers to advise them that I would be out of the country for a couple of weeks. Then, quickly enough, the Continental gate personnel began checking documents of those passenger going to Lima at 3:45 p.m. this afternoon on CO 590.
I got a seat assignment fairly readily. My ZED (Zonal Employee Discount) ticket, which I can purchase thanks to my airline employment, cost just over $80 including taxes and fees. I got to my seat and found myself immediately within the powerful energy field of the man in the adjoining seat, Dr. Carlos Zevallos.
We began our conversation immediately. I soon knew that this stocky man speaking in heavily accented English had left Peru in 1968 after completing medical school. He completed a residency in rheumatology at the Cleveland Clinic after which he was offered a staff position at the clinic. Though Carlos had intended to return to Peru to practice medicine, he accepted the clinic´s offer rather than return to the dicey political situation extant in Peru in the 1970´s. Besides his practice, he serves on the faculty of the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine. My luck: another overachiever for a seatmate!
Carlos is now a citizen of the United States, married nearly 40 years to Gladys, a nurse from Peru. Carlos and Gladys go back to Peru fairly regularly to visit family and friends. He´s proud of his Peruvian heritage and spent a good hour talking--and writing entries into my notebook-- about restaurants, cultural and historic sites, and Peruvian dishes that I absolutely couldn´t miss.
He outlined an itinerary that could take me days to accomplish, and I planned to be in Lima for only a day, maybe two. If I was to go to only one place it should be the Museo de la Nacion. I should certainly have ceviche (raw fish, lime juice, onions and peppers) while I´m in Peru, preferably made with sea bass (corbina), preferably eaten outside (afuera) at a fine seaside restaurant in Miraflores (a barrio, or suburb, of Lima) called La Rosa Nautica.
Carlos gave his highest marks to a dish called cabrito con frijoles (baby goat with beans): that one earned three emphatic X´s as measures of his enthusiasm for the dish. Among his honorable mentions was chicharrones (pork), perhaps followed by a dessert of picarones. These are only a sampling from the information he provided. In the background the whole time, another seat over and next to the window, Gladys was there to weigh in with clarifications and additional background as necessary, but she generally kept to herself and a book of word games she brought along for the trip.
I think that Carlos really enjoyed recalling those things he loved growing up in Peru more than 40 years ago. He described the tastes and shapes of many varieties of potatoes (papas) and bananas (plantanas).
Oh yes, yes, I would have to go to a pastry shop near Plaza San Martin called Pasteleria San Martin and try their empanadas. While there, buy a kilo of a sweet specialty called Turrones de Dona Pepa to take home to my wife.
I should shop for turquoise and silver at the indigenous craft market along Av. Petit Thouars in Miraflores. But don´t pay the price marked! Bargain, bargain, bargain. It would be a source of shame to accept the list price as the true bottom line. And on we went...
Yes, yes, give me your notebook again, Carlos would say, and soon there would be another entry. One memory elicited another. I would have to try the lucuma ice cream, he said. It´s a little gritty, but oh it´s so delicious!
He laughed and recited a Peruvian adage about food: Lo que no mata, engorda (What doesn´t kill you will make you fat).
Carlos´ head would bob as he occasionally succombed to sleep, and then he´d be refreshed, excited to be going back home. And as we drew closer to it, we said goodbye on the plane and again in the back-and-forth queue we snaked through to clear Peruvian customs. Several planes seemed to have arrived at once, each spilling out 200 or more travelers who would have to be processed before entering the country.
The waiting area at Lima´s Aeropuerto Internacional Jorge Chavez is chaotic, to say the least. Friends and family crowd along barriers inside the terminal, shouting out for attention to their arriving loved ones. Taxi drivers holding signs with the names of hotel guests they were sent to pick up join the fray.
I looked closely, but couldn´t find anyone brandishing a Hotel Espana sign with my name on it, so I approached a driver with a Hotel Espana sign with someone else´s name on it. After a bit of tentative explanation of my situation, the driver made a call back to the hotel, then took me on as a fare.
I was soon piling into a tiny yellow taxi and we were on our way. The drive from the airport to centro Lima takes you through alarmingly rundown areas of the city, but I´d been on this drive a year ago and was not concerned.
I tried out my halting Spanish on my driver, Cesar. He was delighted that I tried to speak in his native tongue, and he had a sprinkling of English to get us over any rough patches. He was a delight, and clearly proud of his country. He reminded me uncannily of an aggressive tout I met in Yurimaguas last year--also named Cesar.
At the end of a 30-minute drive I got checked-in at Hotel Espana, then went out to a small convience store--really just a hole in the wall with a wide variety of sundries for sale. A TV blared a Chinese-made, Spanish-dubbed show on the Cartoon Network. Coolers contained cold drinks, including beer. I had gone to the store solely to buy bottled water to brush my teeth and to wash down some vitamins, but the sight of some other Hotel Espana guests who had been on my plane from Houston--one of them a middle-aged woman who easily measure 6 feet 4 inches in height--enjoying a sweaty glass of cold beer was too much for me. So I took a seat and ordered up a cerveza which came in a 620-ml bottle (about 20 ounces compared to our normal 12-ounce bottles) and cost me perhaps $1.25.
It took little time to finish off the beer and return to my room with the 2-liter bottle of water. I´m sure it must have been 1 a.m.--the same time in Lima as it was in Wichita--when I turned on my MP3 player and turned off the lights.
I awoke before 7 a.m. in my small, clean room at Hotel Espana (GPS coordinates 12 02.773S / 77 01.625W). There is a good-size, tiled bathroom with shower and ample hot water. I availed myself of the amenities and then took to the streets of centro Lima.
I had seen the grand buildings surrounding the Plaza de Armas (also known as Plaza Mayor: GPS coordinates 12 02.756S / 77 01.867W) on the ride to the hotel last night. Though I had stayed here before, it was only to sleep and depart very early in the morning. Today I could walk around the area and enjoy the sights and sounds and tastes of Lima.
Hotel Espana is very centrally located, within a few blocks or less of the renowned Monasterio de San Francisco in one direction, and Plaza Mayor and its attractions in the other.
I wanted to walk towards Plaza San Martin (GPS coordinates 12 03.094S / 77 02.048W) and an eatery that was highly recommended by Carlos on the flight from Houston yesterday. I couldn´t pass by Plaza Mayor with its cathedral (La Catedral de Lima) and government buildings without stopping for pictures.
Beyond Plaza Mayor there is a wonderful church (Iglesia San Augustin) that stopped me in my tracks with its intricate sculptured entrance. Colorfully clad schoolchildren were being let out of buses and vans into the bright sunshine. Their teachers and nuns marshalled their troops as best they could before entering the church behind standard-bearers.
I wandered further on, hopefully towards Plaza San Martin. I was approached by a clean-cut young man about 20 years in age. I had been warned to avoid changing money on the streets, and changing money (euros, dollars, soles) was obviously his trade. I was leery of anyone approaching me for any reason, and I had no need to change money in any case, so my initial response was to just keep going.
For some reason, though, I stopped and talked to the young man. He knew English pretty well. He asked, as everyone does, where I was from. He gave me his card that told me I was speaking with Fernando de los Santos. We talked about where I traveled last year and where I was going on this trip. It turns out that Fernando hailed from that part of Peru--the Department (or state) of Amazonas--that is in or adjacent to my recent trips.
When a call to his cell phone interrupted us, an idea occurred to me: perhaps he could help me call an acquaintance I had made in Peru last year and who I had arranged (via email) to meet on this trip. Not only did he make the call but, when I could not keep up with the conversation in rapid Spanish, he actually took the phone and made arrangements for me to meet my friend later today at a specified time and place.
Now I wanted to continue looking for Plaza San Martin and a cafe. When I told Fernando, he insisted on taking me about a half-block to a small but busy cafe whose owner he knew. He quickly introduced me and left, and soon I was enjoying a cheese omelette on a bed of rice, coffee, and a tumbler of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Cost? Eleven soles (less than $4).
After breakfast (desayuno) I walked the short way to Plaza San Martin. It´s a nice spot dominated by an imposing statue of the liberator General San Martin and, on one side, by the grand Hotel Bolivar.
I wandered around the plaza taking pictures, then sat down in the shade by one of the fountains that grace two of the corners of the park-like square. There were a few vendors active this morning, including a young man (perhaps 12 or 13?) who asked to shine my shoes.
Well, I didn´t really wish to be approached by anyone, and certainly not by a shoeshine boy. Not only did my brushed leather-and-fabric walking shoes not need any shining, but this enterprise is a favorite ruse for separating tourists from their belonging.
Like other incidents with people in Lima, I followed my first instinct of telling him that I didn´t need or want his services. Thats not likely to deter any entrepreneur worth his salt, and certainly not a street vendor in the city of Lima. He perched himself right in front of me and engaged me in conversation as I looked furtively left and right.
Plaza San Martin, like most of the heavily trafficed tourist areas of Lima, is pretty secure. There are police and military of every stripe, some with machine guns, some sitting atop attack vehicles. I think it would be unlikely that a tourist would be physically assaulted under these circumstances, but that doesn´t mean there are not legions of grifters out to get your goods or money by more subtle methods.
I soon knew the young man as Michael, a name he provided before he knew mine. He asked for my email address, which I wrote down for him. He wants to contact me. He would like to go to the United States. He was undoubtedly poor, but he said he went to school in the afternoons and would graduate in a couple of years. He may have been essentially an orphan, or perhaps lives with extended family in Lima. In any case, his mother is ill and lives in Cusco; his father is dead.
After my initial rejection of Miguel´s services, he never seemed to be actively soliciting any of my money. He just talked, and asked me to take his photo. By this time, of course, I wanted to give him a little something, but not like you´d drop money in a beggar´s cup. So I asked him to go ahead and do my shoes. Well, with a little piece of sandpaper to freshen up the nap of the leather, and a sponge and cleaner to work on the sides of the soles, a good shoeshine boy can really improve the looks of your zapatas.
I left Miguel a couple of small coins and left him to continue walking around the plaza to search out a place recommended by Carlos on the plane, Pasteleria San Martin, and to try a house specialty, a sweet pastry called Turron Especial de Dona Pepa. I found the shop and bought some of the turrones, which are sold by weight. It consists of paper-thin layers of pastry topped with a sort of carmel sauce and decorated with small, thin pieces of hard candy. The confection has a definite taste of honey, and I seemed to detect a hint of anise, I think.
Perhaps it´s an acquired taste, but I did not feel compelled to purchase a kilo of the turrones to bring back home. On the other hand, when a baker came out of the kitchen with a heaping tray of sesame seeded crescent-shaped rolls that were still almost too hot to touch, I could not resist adding to my order.
My appointment with my friend was at 1 p.m. I had met Madelaine last year st the airport in Tarapoto. I was waiting on a delayed flight to Lima, bantering in broken Spanish with a couple of clerks in the gift shop. (It didn´t hurt that they were pouring complimentary samples of a variety of locally produced beverages.) Made (MAH-day) was carrying a beginning English workbook with her, and she asked if she could join us and practice her English a little.
As with virtually everyone I met and talked with for more than five minutes in Peru,
we exchanged email addresses. Since then we have sent each other occasional messages and pictures of our families.
And so, a year later, I didn´t even know if I would recognize Ms. Madelaine Margot Gonzalez Silva when I saw her. Dark hair, late 30´s, perhaps just over 5-feet tall, olive skin: many Peruvian women would fit that description. Pretty, thin, glasses, business-like in appearance: that narrows it down a little. Still I wondered if I would know her when she walked in.
I waited in the lobby of Hotel Espana and she arrived right on time at 1 o´clock. Recognition was not a problem. We talked awhile and then went to lunch at a cafe on Pasaje Olaya just off Plaza Mayor. I ordered a dish recommended to me by Carlos, the Cleveland osteopath and Peruvian native with whom I rode to Lima, a dish called aji de gallina.
Made had come to meet me at my hotel directly from her work. As nearly as I can determine, she is a mid-level government employee at the federal level, working for an agency similar to our Social Security Administration. I asked when she would have to return to work and she told me that she would have the afternoon free. (I guess it´s good to be a bureaucrat no matter the government you serve.)
I wanted to get to one or more of the sites recommended by Carlos and my guidebooks. With Made hailing and negotiating fares with taxi drivers, we went first to the Museo de la Nacion. My guidebooks said it would be open this afternoon, and Lonely Planet Peru said it was ¨the best museum in the ountry for getting your head around Peru´s myriad prehistoric civilizations.¨
As we popped out of our flimsy taxi, the forbidding, Soviet-style architecture of the museum was hardly softened by the presence of dozens of armed police and military. When I stopped to take a photo at the entrance, I was firmly told that I could not do that. Then we were told that the museum was closed for the remainder of this day. Asked why, the officials told us that a meeting of high government officials from several countries was to take place at the museum later today. And so I would not be ¨getting my head around¨ ancient civilizations or anything else at this site.
We chose to go to Miraflores next. It´s one of the tony barrios of Lima, upscale in every way: great shopping, fine restaurants, high-class hotels. Think of Miraflores as the Peruvian answer to La Jolla, California, and you´ll have a pretty good handle on it.
Permit me to digress and to attempt to describe a taxi ride in Lima. The vehicles themselves are generally small, sometimes tiny, and often rundown to a seemingly dangerous extent. Have you ever seen a flock of blackbirds in the late fall, perhaps tens of thousands in some flocks, all the individual birds heading to the same place at breakneck speed. Somehow the birds negotiate abrupt changes in direction without injury or, apparently, even contact of any kind. Whatever mystical hand guides such flocks must also cast a protective aura about the legions of taxis on the streets of Lima. I never saw a collision though traffic merging onto a busy thoroughfare reminded me of the old high school science films showing blood cells squeezing into a capillary.
Oh yes, Miraflores. Made and I got out of the taxi in an area of shops a couple of blocks from Parque Kennedy. As we approached the park we saw numerous artists and vendors selling framed and unframed pictures along the Malecon Oscar Benavides. In the trees, raucous flocks of small, parrot-like birds (loras?) flew in and out.
I saw signs advertising an exhibit of photographic art to be on display in Parque Kennedy until June 15. And what an exhibit it was! La Tierra Vista Desde El Cielo is an exhibit of photographs--each measuring perhaps four feet by six feet in size--taken by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The title of the exhibit translates as ¨The Earth From Above.¨ As a fortunate recipient of the opulent book as a gift, I was familiar with the artist and many of the displayed works. To see some of these photos, go to www.yannarthusbertrand.org. This outdoor exhibit may easily have had 100 high quality images displayed in an outdoor environment. Very, very impressive.
It was late afternoon, 5 o´clock or later, when we began to walk the half-mile or so from Parque Kennedy to the promenade atop the cliffs several hundred feet above the Pacific Ocean. Parasailers drifted left and right directly in front of us, seemingly close enough to conduct a conversation with the pilots.
There is a park along the promenade called Parque del Amor (GPS coordinates 12 07.630S / 77 02.189W). Sure enough, there was a bride and groom and their photographer capturing the couple´s youth and beauty and commitment. Elevated on a platform 10 feet above the ground was a sculpture of two lovers locked in a somewhat alarming embrace.
Far below was a long causeway buil out into the Pacific, a huge old restaurant occupying the entire structure. Made said that it was La Rosa Nautica, the Miraflores restaurant so enthusiastically recommended to me by Carlos, land by guidebooks. But La Rosa Nautica was far below us and the sun had already set.
Made wanted to be home by 7 p.m., and so we began to walk back to central Miraflores where we caught a taxi to centro Lima and my hotel. Made continued on from there to her home, catching one of the packed buses that ply the streets of Lima in great numbers and with a bewildering assortment of routes.
It was only 7 p.m., so I could hardly retire for the evening. I went to an Internet business around the corner from Hotel Espana and spent a couple of hours checking email and working on my blog. Then I decided to search out some ice cream before going to bed.
Lord, I think I was channeling Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond when he went out and couldn´t seem to find his way home to a ploace he´d known for decades. I had a map (but not my GPS) and still could not seem to get myself the few short blocks from Plaza Mayor to Hotel Espana.
I would re-trace my steps, carefully counting the blocks: let´s see, hmmm, start at the corner by La Catedral, go two blocks, turn right, it should be there. No? Let´s go back and do it again. This got frustrating, the streets seemed to empty after 11 o´clock, and seeing a block ahead of me with only another pedestrian or two had me thinking about my own safety.
Finally, something clicked and I was able to make sense of the map. I got back without incident and wasted little time getting into bed. If someone told me that I had walked 10 miles today, I would not be surprised.
THIS NARRATIVE CONTINUES ON A SEPARATE ENTRY,
SOUTH AMERICA 2008--Days 3 - 4 (Lima, Tarapoto and Yurimaguas, Peru)
You're right, Mick, there never was a lot of slacking going on in the Jennings family.
They were our aristocracy,yet never seemed to realize that they were. One of Hutch's large grain elevators bore the name "C. D. Jennings." Homer, C. D.'s son, lived in a stately home on the road to Nickerson, and had a stately but unassuming family that we saw and spoke to in church. I remember two good looking sons, but they were younger, so I didn't know them.
I called Jan this morning, wondering if she could add anything to my recollection. (It was too early to call Sharon in CA.) Indeed she did:
Charles was on the debate team with Jan, and she described him as "a dear friend," with whom she has lost contact. Last she knew, he was practicing medicine in India. His younger brother's name is Bill, and they had a younger sister, of whom I have no recollection.
Thanks for your gps data that has simplified my vicarious travel experience.
Looking forward to hearing of things in Iquitos.
This week, I think I've identified the bay where the Brig Orleans anchored to go tortoise hunting on Albemarle/Isabela Island in the Galapagos. 0 deg 25 min 40 sec South; 90 deg 57 min 46 sec West. Should be an easy side trip from Quito. Not.
As you may recall, they also stopped at the well known Post Office Bay on Charles/Floreana Island, where they buried Mr. Horsley.
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, Jr. Azángaro 105, Lima) until literally five minutes before I pulled the plug on my laptop for the last time prior to leaving for the airport. 
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October, 2007