Peru 2014

I have done a lot of travelling in my time, which only reminds me that I'm getting old. I'm also reminded that I have never set foot in the southern hemisphere. Now, Air Canada has a direct service to Lima. Not having much to do these days, I've no difficulty with the decision, off to Peru.

The flight arrives after mid-night in the suburban city of Callao, a place where travellers are warned not to be wandering about alone, not even in daytime. So, unusually for me, I have reserved a hotel and an airport pick-up.

At two in the morning, Hotel España is not very interested in doing the paper work; they toss me a key and point the way upstairs.

Hotel España is an old casona, filled with marble statues, oil paintings, crystal chandeliers and ceramic tile floors. All this costs 55 Soles (C$22) per night and it's a two-minute walk from Plaza de Armas in the centre of Lima.

Morning at Hotel España. The rooftop breakfast room is just outside my door. I step into a sunny España morning scene. The resident peacock with magnificent tail feathers sits primping and preening on the railing.

A pair of turtles are making their way ever so slowly across the concrete floor. The ardent male is trying hard to mount, but the female (presumably) keeps moving away, making the thing all but impossible to do. Turtle sex apparently is slow and steady, like everything that turtles do, no passion, no heavy breathing, no climax, no satisfied deep sigh. It's rather sad. The pigeon wants to have nothing to do with all this.

Inside the dining room, a young man is dragging chairs and tables around and mopping the floor while he sings in a full baritone voice, - "Besame mucho". Already I love this place.

I meet an American man, Jim, who lives in Peru and hasn't been back to the states in eight years. He has a coffee business in Amazonia and he'll soon have his Peruvian citizenship. Jim reinforces my intention to avoid the gringo trail to Machu Picchu. In his eight years here he has not seen that place.

"How do you get by with a name like Jim? Don't you get Heem, Keem, Sheem?"

"No, no problem, they all call me Don Gringo!"

The young lady Maude from Quebec, her little boy and her Peruvian spousal unit arrived on my flight from Toronto and we shared the car to our hotel. ¡Buenos Días!

Our rooftop offers a view of the Monastery and Church of San Francisco.

Plaza de Armas is the centre of any Latin American city; it's just a two minute walk from my hotel. This is the place where Spanish imperial forces would parade and practice, show the flag and carry out executions. Posh tourist hotels and restaurants line one side of the plaza.

The horse-drawn calesa makes circuits round and round the plaza. The tourists sit in silence, savouring the moment, the driver is lost in his i-pad, the horse knows the route and manages the heavy traffic very well; he's totally in charge.

At Parque de la Muralla, a parade is being prepared. I will find out as the days go on, - there is always a parade

I catch a bus for the 200 km ride to Barranca. There is no negotiation here, no transition zone between the desert and the sea, just a ragged, hard line with cold water on one side and the burning desert on the other.

At one point we pass a big military base surrounded by a high brick wall between the highway and the sea. A bus has crashed into the corner of the wall, making a big hole. The bus too hasn’t come off very well. A big armoured car has come out, and a lot of soldiers armed with assault rifles. These people are not very happy. No, I didn’t get the picture.

The picture above shows where the bus would have gone had it left the road a minute earlier.

Barranca. Taxis in the smaller cities and towns are “mototaxis” powered by stinky little two-stroke engines. Hundreds of them fill the streets like a swarm of insects, providing a cheap and convenient transport system. The town is up high above the cliff, but a twenty minute walk or a five minute ride in a mototaxi will get you down to the beach, a good place to catch a lunch and a beer and watch the surf roll in. Nobody is swimming here; the water is too cold.

Not far out of Barranca is the ancient city of Caral, at five thousand years old this is by far the oldest city in America, a contemporary of ancient Babylon. The city sits in the desert but it overlooks the fertile valley of the River Supe.

My ride to Caral in a colectivo is shared with a French man, a serious young man with a big camera. He is in the eighth month of his ‘round the world tour. We do the visit together and share the cost of the obligatory Spanish-speaking guide. Between the two of us, we have enough language to ask all the good questions in Spanish and discuss the information in French. After thousands of years of weathering, only the worn down stubs of the institutional buildings remain visible. The best archaeological finds are made by excavating the hidden parts. The ordinary shops and residences would have been made with organic materials and would have entirely filled the available space; these are all gone without a trace.

The cars from Barranca to Huaraz depart from a gas station out at the highway corner. Finding the car is not difficult; the first clue is the young man with driving gloves and wrap-around sunglasses standing by his car and shouting out - Huarazhuarazhuaraaaaaaaaz!

This is my first experience with a long distance colectivo; the driving gloves and wrap-around sunglasses are indicators of how it will go. He leans forward in his place, grips the wheel with both hands and attacks the road like a racing car driver. At every curve, he sets up the fastest line using the entire road. It’s an exciting ride. I arrive in Huaraz exhausted and shaken. I will find out in coming days that this is the way it is done and I might as well just enjoy it.

Huaraz is a base for many young hikers and mountain climbers, which gives it a good fund of tourist facilities and something of a youthful swagger. I land into Hostal Churup, a friendly pack-packer type of place that is virtually empty at this season. It’s S/ 60 (C$25).

The Plaza de Armas de Huaraz is dominated by the remains of the cathedral that was wrecked by the earthquake of 1970. The empty shell of the cathedral sits behind a hoarding and a new church has been built beside it. 90% of the city was flattened by this event and half of the population was killed. At the same time, the nearby town of Yungay was completely buried by a landslide, including the entire population.

A previous earthquake in 1941 released the water of Lago Palcacocha which flattened Huaraz and killed about 5,000 people. This is a place where you live your life with the knowledge that an unannounced life-changing or life-ending event may occur at any moment.

The pre-Inca archaeological site of Chavín de Huantar can be visited on a day trip from Huaraz, but it’s so far off the map that the only practical way to do it is to buy the bus tour. I buy.

In the picture, the debris on the road is a thing that occurs with every rainfall. many of these mountains are built of compacted gravel and boulders, easy to shake loose in an earthquake or wash out with water. This hill is made of real stone, but - there are gaps between the strata that you can stick a hand into, and the strata are tilted almost to the vertical, making it so easy for the whole thing to slide when it gets shaken.

The road is most interesting; it rises to its highest point, 4515 metres (14800 feet) where a tunnel is cut through the mountain to avoid going even higher. Then it goes down, down, down to Chavín. The river at Huaraz flows west to the Pacific Ocean; the river at Chavín flows into the Amazon basin and out to the Atlantic.

Our bus has stopped at a restaurant to have a pi-pi break and we are all served a cup of coca tea which is claimed to be a preventive for soroche (altitude sickness). There are also little bags of coca leaves that you can chew and swallow. This is not cocaine; it’s just the unprocessed basic ingredient and it’s legally sold in shops and restaurants. After chewing a few leaves I’m starting to feel ever so slightly buzzed, so I stop there.

When roads are blocked (every day in the rainy season) the big loaders come out and fix them. The smaller blockages are often cleared by young people working for tips.

Our guide Lucho introduces the 3,000 year old site at Chavín.

We have a late lunch outdoors under a tin roof with a gentle rain and a flock of geese for entertainment. Then, back to Huaraz.

The net bags in this market street are full of cuy (guinea pigs) going to the dining tables of Huaraz. They are a native species here, domesticated as a food source since thousands of years.

It’s Saturday night; a big street dance is being prepared and the street by the Plaza de Armas is closed to traffic. Sunday morning, the party continues. I have time to kill waiting for my bus to La Unión; there will be music.

Bands are playing all over town on Sunday morning; cases of beer on the road help to lubricate the festivities. Beer and discordant brass music, throw in some Christian religious symbols and you have a complete cultural celebration with something for everyone.

The bus from Huaraz to La Unión takes five hours to make a journey that would only be eighty km long if it could be made into a straight line. As the pictures show, it's not a straight line, but it is an exciting ride and not one for the faint-hearted.

La Unión is a very small place and quite off the map. It's a half way point on the road between Huaraz and Huánuco; I think this is likely the main reason for its existence. The journey is too long to be made in one day, except in the most favourable conditions. The most favourable conditions would be a fast car in the dry season. You don't want to be driving this road in the dark. As a way station, La Unión has a lot of basic hostels and restaurants. Very basic.

I try not to be the demanding kind of tourist; not to expect everything to be just like it is at home. I like to travel cheap and meet the people straight across, because of a life lesson that I have learned: The more money you spend on travel, the more you will be protected from and isolated from the people and places that you have come to see.

But there are limits.

I step into a typical restaurant on the main street, a small room with ten tables more or less, door open to the street, "Menu Ejecutivo" hanging on the wall. The waitress shuffles to my table, a chubby teen-ager with a round expressionless face, dead eyes. I ask her a question; I can't hear her answer and I can't see her mouth forming the words, because her hand is over her mouth, holding a snotty kleenex under her dripping nose. Thanks, but I think I'll try somewhere else. Somewhere else, I find a "caldo de pollo" that fills the hole very well for about a dollar. That's a bowl of noodle soup with a big chunk of tough chicken breast from an old laying hen.

Walking about after dinner, I hear some brassy music and a drum. There's a very short side street with a small church at the top and it looks as if a parade is about to break out. I walk in. The inevitable cases of beer are on the pavement, and some of the lads are quite drunk. My arrival interrupts their party as they stop everything and try to focus their glazed eyes on the strange gringo at the edge of their group. There's no hostility, but I think this is not the best place for me to be. So I pass by with a wave and a "Buenas noches”.

Having experienced the night life of La Unión, I turn in early at my Hostal Viajero. The place is new. They tell me I'm their first customer. My room is a basic box, but everything is new and clean. Morning, I wish them all success with their new hotel; walk up the street to find a piece of bread and a car to Huánuco. My ride is easy to find. The young man on the street is calling out Huánucohuánucohuánucooooooo.

In the pictures, the mountain has slid down and covered the road. The little stream has washed out the road, leaving a big hole. The digger is at work, moving debris off the road and putting it into the hole. To the right, half of the road has collapsed into the stream. Our delay is only about half an hour.

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The whole mountain is made of boulders and mud, nothing here that would resist rain or earthquakes. Clearly, the mountain has not finished sliding down, and the stream continues to flow across the road and wash away the fill material almost as fast as the machine can replace it. And the rainy season is not yet over. This will be an ongoing project.

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Huánuco is a very agreeable small city with a big shady Plaza de Armas and a fast flowing river. My Bible (Lonely Planet) confesses that there is nothing of interest to see here, except for a church that may or may not be open. It's one of those places unlike New York City, of which you might say: "Nice place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit there."

There is also Huánuco's very fine stone arch bridge which the Lonely Planet people may have missed, and there is a claim to have the best climate in the world. Not too high and not too low, Huánuco's altitude at 1900 metres (6200 ft) places it in the sweet spot, along with half of Mexico and many other places.

HUANUCO EL MEJOR CLIMA DEL MUNDO

In the morning, I catch a mototaxi to the bus station and a bus to Cerro de Pasco. As often happens on the buses, the in-flight entertainment is a huckster. This one is selling little bags of white powder that will cure any health problem you may have. He reels off a long list. His price is a special promotion price. When this wonderful product becomes better known it will be available in stores, but at a much higher price.

He makes some sales (no, not to me), but he's not finished. He has another bag filled with very special soap made of coconut oil that will make you younger.

The road to Cerro continues to be interesting, bottomless canyons in the low places, and llamas in the high places.

Cerro de Pasco, population 80,000 is the highest city of its size in the world at 4333metres (14299 ft), a city built around the rim of a huge open pit mine. The pit is about 2 km long by 1 km wide. Whenever the pit expands, it encroaches on , or should I say, under the surrounding city. The buildings in the picture below are all boarded up. At its outer limits the city is bound in by the mountains of mine tailings.

They pull a lot of metals out of the ground here, silver, lead and zinc. The mines (this is only one of many) do stir up a lot of pollution. The people of Cerro test high for heavy metal intoxication, but the mines do provide the biggest source of foreign income, enabling Peru to buy its petroleum and all manufactured products. There may be a way to solve this dilemma, but they haven’t found it in Cerro.

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I catch a lunch, then take a bus onward to La Oroya. This is a place that processes the ore taken out at places like Cerro. There is a town up the street, a narrow strip of town jammed in between hills of bald rock. I'm just here to catch a car going to Tarma.

This place is a three-way intersection surrounded by industrial buildings. From time to time a deafening siren sounds and all conversation stops; crossing gates go down and all traffic halts. A train of ore cars rumbles across the space.

I want to see these places, but I've no need to stay very long. Tarma is just an hour away

Tarma has some attractive qualities, including a plaza with palm trees growing at 3050 metres (10,000 ft), some pedestrianized streets and a big flower market.

My hotel in Tarma is Hospedaje El Dorado, an old casona with two internal patios, 28 rooms and a dining room, all for S/35 (C$14). There are no other guests. I take my supper next door at Restaurant Davory. Tarma’s main attraction for travellers is as a stopping place on the way to Amazonia.

The road from Tarma to La Merced descends from 10,000 feet to 2600 feet and the ride has lots of visual interest. No point in worrying about what could go wrong; yes the margin of error for travellers on these roads is very small, and so the risk is significant. But the risk of dying here is orders of magnitude smaller than the commonly accepted risk (50%) of dying from tobacco.

It’s hot and steamy here in La Merced, we’re not up in the mountains any more; we’re in the upper Amazon Basin. This will be a two-shirt day.

Pictures taken in and around the town’s small Plaza de Armas.

I’ve walked the whole town, now a dinner in La Merced’s fanciest restaurant. Tomorrow I’ll take the bus back to Tarma and on to Huancayo.

The bus terminates at a busy market street in Tarma; it’s just a ten-minute walk up to the centre of town. I know the way. Lunch and a walk up the street to where the colectivos go to Huancayo.

A bit of bad luck here. One likes to be the first passenger to get into the car and take the front seat, though it means you may wait for some time until the car fills up. It won’t leave with less than four passengers. It’s OK to be the second or fourth passenger, you get a rear window seat. I’m the third passenger to arrive for this ride, - that means the dreaded middle seat, the hard one, the one where you can’t get any pictures. So, I hang around at some distance from the car, trying to look as if I’m not really there. Finally, a young woman joins us and I’m hoping she will just jump in. Nope. She looks at me with a she-who-must-be-obeyed look and says “get in”. I get in.

Huancayo is Peru’s second biggest city with 350,000 people, a tiny fraction of Lima’s population. Where Lima’s wealth and urban energy have largely moved out to suburban Miraflores, Huancayo’s Plaza de la Constitución remains the heart of the city.

Yes, there are parades you can’t throw a rock in Huancayo without hitting a parade. The music and dancing go on all over the centre. When one group stops, another starts up.

For my ride back to Lima, I get the front seat, and my driver David Gómez is happy to be my tour guide. The ride takes 6 hours each way over some very hairy roads, and David makes the return trip every day.

High point on the road, just after La Oroya the Anticona Pass has a sign announcing its altitude at 4818 metres (15800 ft).

I have one more day before flying home, a good day to see Miraflores, the ocean-side suburb, the new Lima that has sucked the urban energy and prosperity out of the old Lima. Yes, the point is clear; it’s a little bit of California in Peru.

The first little hints of the Garúa are rolling in from the cold Humboldt current. The fog will intensify until it wraps Lima in a fuzzy grey blanket; Limeños will rarely see the sun for about six months from May to October.

There’s a long poem, written by Jorge Donayre, that celebrates the writer’s love for Peru, even as he enumerates Peru’s harsh realities: the Garúa, landslides, earthquakes, floods, droughts. . . . . . . He ends each verse with Viva el Perú, Carajo! (Long live Peru, fuck!)

To-night at midnight, I must be at the airport for my return flight to the land of snow.

The last verse of Donayre’s poem:

¡Viva el Perú!, mi patria, la de mi hijo, de mis amigos buenos, la mujer que me ama, mi provincia, mi derruida casa. Y cuando los diarios digan: el Perú perdió en fûtbol, el Perú país pobre, vino otro terremoto, se secaron los ríos,se enlodan los politicos, bajó el sol, se perdió la cosecha, repicaremos desde el fondo de los huesos, el grito poderoso de los hombres de esta tierra, cargada de coraje y de optimismo para decir: ¡Viva el Perú Carajo! . . . ¡Viva el Perú Carajo! ¡Viva el Perú Carajo! . . . ¡Viva el Perú Carajo! ¡Viva el Perú Caraaaaaaaajooo!

Long live Peru! my fatherland, land of my son, of my good friends, the woman who loves me, my province, my wrecked house. And when the papers say: Peru has lost in football, Peru, poor country, then comes another earthquake, the rivers dry up, the politicians are muddied, the sun goes down, the harvest is lost, we will shout out with all our hearts, the powerful call of the men of this land, filled with courage and optimism to say: ¡Viva el Perú Carajo! . . . ¡Viva el Perú Carajo! ¡Viva el Perú Carajo! . . . ¡Viva el Perú Carajo! ¡Viva el Perú . . . Caraaaaaaaaaaaajoo!

Portrait Gallery