In case of boredom, break glass.

It was time to leave Lima. Our reaction? M’eh. It was time for our dreaded 22-hour bus ride. Our reaction? Total dread. Knowing it would be a long time before we were in a bed, Adrian and I slept in as late as we could, managing to miss breakfast service (actually all food service) at the hostel and leaving us just seconds to spare before check out time. Breakfast was easily solved a few doors down the block. The price was double but the coffee was twice as delicious and really that’s the important thing, isn’t it?

Then it was back to the hostel without the common room to hang out and do nothing for the next four hours until our bus. Well Adrian did nothing while I did some mad emailing and sorting out of problems. I arranged our hostel in La Paz and forewarned them that I was getting a package of replacement credit cards couriered to the address. The owner replied and he was a super helpful and super nice guy who even recommended DHL versus Fedex based on his experience. Not only was DHL cheaper than Fedex they were faster – promising 2-day delivery rather than 2-week delivery. So thanks for that tip, Osgur. Now it was time to get those suckers sent over and for that I have to give a shout out to my most awesome sister Andrea and her partner Mike too. Not only are they looking after all our mail – including opening it and sorting it for us (which is the a huge task but so important) – these two together took care of gathering up the replacement credit cards, a replacement bank card (remember I lost mine back in Guatemala), packaging it all up, then driving way out to the middle of suburbia to drop it off at the DHL depot. That was above and beyond the call of duty. I can’t repay the favour at the moment but I owe them big time. The two even went out and did some PSP game shopping for Adrian (with our cash). Oh that’s right, I forgot to mention that my most awesome mother, bought Adrian another PSP which was also in the package. Wow, is my family awesome or what. Have I said awesome enough? Nope. They are totes awes (for those of you not fluent in cherylese that’s totally awesome and not in a valley girl sort of way). Okay gushing and thanking over and done with I’ll now get back to the 22-hour bus ride (although you may soon wish I was still thanking and awesome-ing).

Before heading out to the bus station we headed back to the cheap restaurant run by the nicest women for a late lunch early supper. The food was more tasty salad and yummy soup followed by a mediocre pasta – but at only $2 for the full meal, mediocre is pretty darn tasty. Then it was back to the hostel to grab our bags and a cab. The hostel told us they’d flag down a taxi for us. Although we’d only paid 6 soles to get to the Museo Nacional the previous day, the hostel told us it was going to cost 12 soles to get to the bus station which wasn’t much further. I already knew our cab fare yesterday had been a fluke so we let them hail the cab. Once we were in the cab, the driver told us the price was 15 soles. Adrian and I immediately got out of the cab. I guess the nice taxi drivers yesterday were just a fluke as well. The porter from the hostel rushed over and talked the driver into the 12 sole fare although neither seemed happy about that. I remembered the local girl cursing at the bus driver over 25 centavos yesterday and blocked out the taxi driver’s glare as we headed to the bus station.

The bus station was surprisingly full with waiting to depart passengers. We tried to check in our luggage but were turned away – despite there being no one in line and our bus scheduled to leave in 15 minutes. As we squeezed into the last two seats in the waiting room nearly decapitating a few small children with our large unchecked bags, an announcement explained that our bus was going to be 45 minutes late. During that 45 minutes, buses going to Ecuador came and went as well as a bus from Santiago, and it appeared that the entire waiting room had emptied and filled up with new passengers twice over. Getting a bit worried, I asked the clerk when our bus was going to arrive. She made a phone call and told me it would be there in 15 minutes. However, her phone call seemed suspiciously short and one-sided for any information other than a dial tone or busy signal to be conveyed. However, I believed her (probably because I wanted to) and hustled Adrian to check in our bags. Of course there was now another bus loading up and a line up. Granted the line up was 3 people but each of those people had approximately 37 pieces of luggage they wanted to check in and not wanting to pay for the overage tried restacking the luggage on the scale as if their game of luggage would help diminish the weight on the scale. So that 3 person line up took 30 but it helped pass the time because our bus still hadn’t arrive. In the end it didn’t arrive until over 2 hours after the original departure time.

We jumped on the bus only to discover that the seat configuration had changed since we had booked. We had chosen the first two seats on the right hand side but there was only a single row of seats putting us a few rows back on the left. With only three seats across there was more bum and legroom and with only about 5 other passengers on the bus there was plenty of room. But with such a long ride ahead of us it would have been nice to have a view as well. I couldn’t help but wonder if this dearth of passengers was part of the delay – as in, was the company hoping for a few more last minute sales to fill up a few seats. I know just being overly pessimistic again but I blame it on the taxi driver on the way over. Just as tourists bring out the dishonest gene in taxi drivers, taxi drivers bring out the crusty traveler in me. I shook it off. There was a long ride ahead of us and a bad mood would just make it seem longer.

So how does one pass the time on a 22-hour bus ride? Well first there was dinner. It wasn’t served until 9pm (good thing we’d had that big late lunch) but it was hot food –chicken and chips – picked up from a roadside restaurant. A huge improvement on the mystery meat sandwiches we’d received elsewhere. On this bus there was even a tray attachment that meant we didn’t have to eat out of out laps which was nice. The other way to pass the time was watch movies. We saw both Sweet November and Definitely Maybe in Spanish with English subtitles which made Keanu Reeves and Ryan Reynolds seem like good deep actors. Unfortunately we have no idea how either movie ends because the pirated copies of both cut out about 15 minutes before the end of each. But the best way to pass the time was sleeping. Sleeping made 22 hours on a bus not much worse than 12 hours on a bus. The lights went down and we bundled up under the full sized blankets and pillows and drifted off for 7 or 8 hours.

We woke up just after 7am still on the coast. But after our breakfast we turned inland and arrived in Arequipa just after 11am. The bus let us off for an hour which was great for letting us stretch our legs and use a proper loo, one that didn’t require the superhero skills of spiderman to use. Then it was back on the bus for the last 5 hours of the trip. Unfortunately for us, the highway was being resurfaced and the bus crawled along through the barren landscape turning those 5 hours turned into 7.5. And we finally got into Puno after dark exactly 24 hours after we had boarded the bus and 26 hours after we were supposed to leave. Well we were here and that’s what mattered.

We shook off the touts at the station and headed to the taxi stand. And in one of the quickest bait and switch scams on record, the price changed from S3 to S3.50 by the time we closed the door. Inspired by my new here the Girl on the Lima Bus (capitalized for full reverence) I refused to pay and he grudgingly admitted defeat. My hard bargaining skills continued accidentally at the hostel. When I inquired about the cost of a room, I wasn’t sure what I heard the clerk say and repeated it back to her just to make sure. She thought I was bargaining and dropped another $5 off the price. It was still $30 but after 24 hours on a bus, it was worth it for a private room with private hot water bathroom and hot breakfast. But we couldn’t enjoy the room just yet. Our stay in Puno was only for a night because we were heading to Bolivia and after our last border crossing disaster we decided to use a tourist transfer service recommended by Lonely Planet. The price was not unreasonable and they would even stop at a legit moneychanger on the way over. We booked our tickets and then went to a bank machine to get out some money since there were no ATMs in Copacabana, Bolivia. We stuffed ourselves on some pizza and then crawled into bed. We had survived our longest bus ride to date although we weren’t anxious to repeat it anytime soon.

Shining a light on a dark past.

The great thing about revisiting Lima was we were under no pressure to see and do everything. Of course with no pressure we also found it hard to do anything. But today we were forcing ourselves to leave the hostel (the shoebox room we were now in probably helped that decision). Finding new sights to see was a bit of problem. There was one big attraction we hadn't been to – the museo de la nacion - so that's what we decided to visit.

After breakfast we dropped off our laundry and walked out to the non-touristy main street to catch a taxi. This actually worked in our favour as the driver gave us a reasonable price (S6) considering the distance we had to go. The museum (photo above) was off the expressway way out near the main bus company terminals (the location was most likely the reason we hadn’t ventured there before). It was a concrete monstrosity – the love child of Robarts library and the Barbican. But inside we were pleasantly surprised because it was free and huge. A pretty good deal, don't you think.

We spent 3 hours walking around at first bored with with the same pots and weavings we’d seen many other places. But just before we got museum fatigue we arrived at a huge temporary photographic exhibit. It was a pictoral history of the Shining Path – if you think that’s an Incan spiritual retreat, you’d be incorrect. The Shining Path was (and to a certain limited extent still is) a guerilla organization that terrorized Peru from 1980-2002. I had heard about the Shining Path (our old lonely planet briefly mentioned their "disruptive activities") but I had no idea that they basically put Peru in the midst of a civil war – people disappeared, journalists were killed, whole villages wiped out. Some 70,000 people died in the violence and the entire country was devastated. The exhibit recounted the horror of the era and I was shocked that as late as 2002, 9 were killed when a car bomb exploded in the posh Miraflores area of Lima. This wasn’t ancient history this was now. No wonder the city felt like it had changed so much. I remembered in 2005 that there were armed riot police everywhere, and at one point the entire plaza de armas was lined with hundreds of them in full gear as the president attended a children’s Christmas pagent in the courtyard of the presidential palace. There were lots of police now, but without the shields and helmets, they were almost invisible. It seems that every Latin American country we’ve visited has had a period of death and political struggle. But for some reason, this one shocked me. Not just because it was so recent but because the terrorists wiped out entire indigenous villages not too far from Huaraz where we had just come from. And for what reason? Well, I couldn’t figure out what the Shining Path political philosophy was. Maybe the senselessness and pointlessness was what made it even worse. Sigh. Despite the heavy nature of the exhibit we continued on through the museum to the folk art section. It was a much need change and just the up note we needed to finish on. There was an awesome display of masks from the Puno area and since we were headed there next maybe I’d finally find a souvenir that I’d want to take home. Much better that than shrapnel from a Shining Path car bomb (just kidding mom).

Now that we were done with the museum, what to do? There was nothing else in the area but there also appeared to be no easy way back into the centre. Of course there was a plague of taxi drivers sitting in wait just outside the entrance. I approached them to find out how much a ride back would be – it was then I realized what a good deal we had gotten on our way in. The cheapest return price was double what we had paid. When I told the last driver that we only wanted to pay S6, he shook his head and with a smile gave us instructions on how to get to the bus stop. No really, he was nice about it - almost walking us there. Maybe the taxi drivers in Lima are different (doubt it). We got on the bus for about one sole each but for that price we got a nice 45 minute tour of more non-touristy parts of the city. Once again some were familiar thanks to the before and after city hall photo display. But in these locations, some of the places looked like they were regressing to their before states – the market stalls were creeping back onto the roads, the replanted grass and flowers were starting to die and the graffiti was returning. The most exciting thing about the bus was a girl who refused to pay the 75 centavo (about 20¢) fare the driver was asking for. She only wanted to pay for a 50¢ ride and held her ground. So did the driver. The girl lost and got off at the next corner to wait for the next bus. Her arguing over 75 centavos made me feel a lot better for haggling with the taxi drivers for 6 soles.

As we approached the centre, we hit bumper-to-bumper traffic so we hopped off and decided to walk the last 10 blocks. We needed a bank machine and hoped to find one along the way. And we did but none of them would give out more than 400 soles. So we kept walking past the plaza de armas all the way down to the pedestrian mall. We walked for 30 minutes and you’re probably thinking that’s a long walk for an atm but because our bank was stinging us with a $5 fee for every withdrawal, taking out just $150 at a time was going to cost us a lot in a very short time. So we trudged on, but still couldn’t find a place to give us our full limit. We settled for just S700 which was an improvement but still not the best. Now it was time to find some long sleeves for me. Huaraz had been a reminder that I had not packed appropriately for the mountains and I knew Bolivia wasn’t going to get any warmer. We headed back to the non-touristy area behind the hostel where I picked up a polo shit for about $7. Okay so it wasn’t a polar fleece but at least I had sleeves and wasn’t some super-tight sequined, cleavage-baring blouse that seemed to be so popular in women’s fashions down here. I dressed up in my fine new shirt and then we headed out to dinner at another locals spot where my lack of sequins didn’t matter and where $2 got us a huge bowl of soup, main course and drink. If we can keep this up we may be able to recover some of the expenses from the Galapagos sooner than we hoped.

Rude awakenings.

Knock, knock, knock… Knock, knock, knock… Knock, knock, knock, knock, knock! That was how we were woken up. It was the clerk from the hostel. She had given us the wrong room and we would have to move because it was reserved. We got up and began packing up taking our time since check out wasn’t for another 3 hours. However, every 15 minutes either the clerk, the manager, or the maid come back to check if we were out yet forcing us to hurry up. I didn’t understand why they didn’t put the other person in the new room until we opened the door to it. The room was just a box and there was no tv. However it was on the roof of the hostel so there was an even better view of the old city as well as the parrots, turtles, and cat hanging around on the terrace below. Oh well, I thought the price was too good to be true for the other room.

Thanks to our move, we missed the cheap breakfast special (it had run out) and had to pay for the pricey a la carte breakfast. It dampened our moods for going out and doing anything touristy. Originally, we had planned to visit the Pachacamac ruins just outside of Lima. But reading a description of it we didn’t feel like making the long journey out there only to be let down. That was okay. We had plenty of stuff to do like figuring out how to get to Puno, and what we were going to do in Bolivia and where we were going to be for the next couple of weeks. Usually, we’ve just shown up in town and figured it out from there. But we needed to get our replacement credit cards couriered to us and that required a big city address. So we randomly picked a date (two weeks from now) and booked a room at the big hostel in La Paz, told them about the package coming for us, and then sent the hostel address to my awesome sister who was packing and shipping our stuff to us.

Instead we decided to visit a nearby museum across from the Congress. The Museum of the Inquisition. Muahahahahaha. We arrived just as a Spanish tour was beginning so we joined the group. The building had most recently been the home of the Peruvian congress as was just as pretty as you’d expect a government building to be. But it had been built on the site of the old Inquisition trials. Upstairs the former government chambers had been converted into displays about the inquisition – background, process and, of course, torture. The Inquisition was used to enforce the Catholic faith even on non-Catholic believers and unfortunately ended up in many Jewish, Muslim, and Indigenous folks being killed. Downstairs, the original cells still existed complete with original graffiti from the accused (photo above) and we were encouraged to walk around. Now, having been to the house of wax in Niagara Falls none of the displays were particularly shocking. But what was shocking was the fact that the inquisition in Peru lasted almost 300 years, ending after independence in 1820 and only because (my conclusion) they needed the building for the new government. We decided it was time to get the heck out of Peru.

There was an Ormeño bus station not too far from us. We didn’t know if this company had the route we wanted or if the price was acceptable but it was close enough that we didn’t have to take a taxi so we crossed our fingers and headed towards the non-touristy part of town where it was located. I’d take a walk through a dodgy neighbourhood over negotiating with a taxi driver any day. I vaguely remembered walking here way back in 2005 but it didn’t look familiar this time. The only thing we recognized was a park but not from our previous visit. No, it was one of the places featured in the urban renewal display at city hall. This park had previously been a rundown garbage and graffiti strewn gathering place for pickpockets and drug addicts (according to the government). Now, it definitely looked spiffier but I have to admit we didn’t dawdle to find out if the crime had improved. Funny that it used to be such a problem, considering it was right across from a giant court building.

The bus station was just beyond the park, down some dirty side streets that smelt strongly of urine. Ormeño did indeed have direct buses to Puno. Phew. And the price was what we expected for an overnight bus half way across the country. There was a morning departure and an afternoon one but both were a whopping 22-hour bus ride. We chose the late afternoon one and hoped we would sleep through the majority of those hours. Plus it would arrive in mid afternoon so if we don’t sleep on the bus it wouldn’t be long before we would be asleep in a real bed. With tickets purchased, we headed back to the hostel. With no money in our wallets, we were a lot more relaxed and even stopped to buy some 25¢ churros. The neighbourhood still wasn’t pretty but it didn’t seem dangerous just full of people either waiting for buses, selling stuff, and basically going through the motions of living in a capital city.

Back to hostel, it was more searching for places to stay in Puno and then in Bolivia. Adrian annoyed me with his demands of wifi and a tv in every place. If only he knew that we’d be lucky to have 24-hour electricity in some parts of Bolivia. I think I’ll break that to him later. We had had enough rude awakenings already today.

Welcome back to that same old place that you laughed about

There is a unanimous opinion about Lima. It sucks. I often like to disagree with people and this is one of those times. Lima gets a bad rap but it’s not the city that's the problem I think it’s the sky which is almost always grey and hazy and makes the city seem depressing. Sure that grey sky is thanks to pollution but it’s not all bad. There were plenty of things to see and places to visit and we hadn’t seen them all the first time. Well that’s what I remember from our first trip here ages ago and that’s why we didn’t mind returning to Lima. Our bus arrived early and it was still dark as it navigated the city streets. We were in no hurry to get to the hostel as I didn’t expect them to have our room ready but even dragging our feet we arrived at the Hostel Espana just behind the Plaza de Armas at 6am.

Most people stay out in the chichi suburb of Miraflores with the malls, movie theatres and bars but we chose this hostel because it was in the historic centre within walking distance to all the main sites. The hostel was also a historic building – an old colonial mansion filled with the weirdest collection of art (it either belonged in the museum or the trash). We had plenty of time to take it in because as expected our room wasn’t ready. We headed to the roof to wait (the one bad thing was that there was no common area). From there we could see the roof of San Francisco and the thousands of pigeons walking up and getting ready to poop on tourists. We waited there for two hours and then went to check in. Our room still wasn’t ready and now wouldn’t be until 10 so we went upstairs and had breakfast and then went to walk around the Plaza. The city was just walking up but it looked just as we remembered it – the city hall, the cathedral, the presidential palace. But the problem with having been here before was that all of it was too familiar and after a poor sleep on the bus we really just wanted to check in and nap. Luckily our room was now ready and it was worth the wait. It was on the roof with the same view of the church (photo above) plus a private bathroom, tv and lots of room. We promptly took advantage of it and went to sleep.

When we woke up it was mid afternoon. Oops. Adrian demanded McDonald’s for dinner and I acquiesced because we have an agreement. If I allow him McDonald’s every so often (when available of course) he’s agreed not allowed to complain about eating rice with chicken/fish everyday. So we walked by lots of little local cafes offering $3 menus and headed to the pedestrian shopping area – Jiron de la Union where McDonald’s was waiting. No longer sleep deprived, Lima seemed a lot cleaner (except the grey sky) then I remembered and at the city hall a “your tax dollars at work” showcase proudly displayed the urban renewal of the last years. So it wasn’t our imagination. What also wasn’t our imagination was the huge number of gringos – most of them converging on the Mcdonald’s. They all had a look of shock and disorientation that screams “I just got off the plane from Iowa, Milton Keynes or Oshawa” or any other exotic place. Lima is the first stop for maybe backpackers and it shows. I wanted to tell them all it would be okay but didn’t. Instead we lined up for our McNuggets and Big Macs behind them and then headed back to our hostel room to indulge in another comfort – tv.