It was a very long way to Miraflores, the suburb where I had a room booked, and reaching it necessitated asking directions frequently of policemen and passers-by. People seemed kind and friendly. They were, to my surprise, very darkskinned. I had expected them to look more Spanish than Indian. But they are mestizo, of mixed Indian and Spanish blood. One policeman was the spitting image of a picture I had seen of an ancient Incan leader. He had the same coppercoloured skin, strong hooked nose and ferocious features. I could imagine him performing a human sacrifice by tearing out a still-beating heart. But this image evaporated when his severe countenance smiled at me.
But what a dump Lima was so far! The guide book had been dead right about the perpetual smog and fog. And, worse in my opinion, it was cold. Yet no other city in the Americas enjoyed such power and prestige in the colonial era as Lima. The long road from Callao wended through a barren, treeless landscape congested with daggy old cars and lined by squalid concrete or adobe box-shaped houses.
When at last we reached the foreshore of Miraflores the houses began to improve, until eventually some were quite grand. Miraflores, ‘view of flowers’, a century ago was a small resort town where people went for summer weekends, but now it is a prosperous suburb of Lima and I had read that it was a much safer place to stay than downtown. We drove up the main street, which had some magnificent buildings and was crowded with modern shops. But as my taxi circled the central roundabout I saw that it was surrounded by soldiers and riot police with clear plastic shields. Black clouds of strong acrid smoke rose from piles of burning tyres. Seeping into the car, they made me cough. This was scary.
Later I learned that this was the dress rehearsal for the protests planned for Independence Day, two weeks away on the twenty-eighth of July. People were angry because they felt that the last election had been rigged.
After a lot of inquiry and a couple of circumnavigations of the block, Domingo Elias Street and the Pension Yolanda were located. There was no sign on the high wooden fence and the gate was locked, but the number was right so I rattled the handle hopefully. A hatch opened in the gate and an old lady with a sweet face examined me and let me in. This was not the entrance to your average hotel, but the owners turned out to be friendly.
Entering the pension I found myself in a terrazzo-paved courtyard with steps at its rear that went up to the guest rooms. The place was rather like the house that Jack built, all higgledy piggledy with bits and pieces everywhere. The office was downstairs on one side of the courtyard and the family lived at the back underneath the guest rooms. Climbing the outside stairs you entered a sitting room, and two rooms went off that. Then there was a tiny communal kitchen with another two rooms off it, and from a side door in the kitchen outside stairs ascended to yet another two rooms. The kitchen had a supply of coffee, tea and boiled (I hoped) water, and a fridge that had a shelf labelled for the use of each room.
I moved into a second-floor room off the kitchen. My room must have been under the top-floor bathroom as it often sounded as though water was running down my walls. The room had an attached closet of a bathroom that was painted a screaming lolly pink. I had to ask at first where it was. I had thought that the odd-looking door up a step on one wall, was the wardrobe. Oh well, I hadn’t expected the Hilton.
It took a while to work out why I kept coming out of the bathroom with plaster in my hair. Then I looked up and saw that the ceiling was disintegrating and hanging down in ribbons like Christmas decorations. The plumbing was exceedingly ancient and no toilet paper was permitted to pollute it. There was only spasmodic hot water and you had to order it in advance. The furniture, except for a magnificent carved chair and bedside cabinet, had a bush-carpentry look.
The room was freezing cold. I pinched all the blankets from the vacant room next door.
With directions from the hotel I walked to Miraflores’s main street. McDonald’s dominated the central roundabout where the two one-way main streets with their central parks containing seats and trees met. In the shops I again found that booze was very cheap, especially imported vodka. Maybe the Peruvians had a special deal with the Russkies. At five I returned to the pension absolutely frozen. I piled all the blankets onto my bed and crawled under them to read. I was very tired and when I was finally warm and had finished my whodunit, I slept.
Next morning I looked out of the window of my room into the narrow space between the pension and the neighbour’s wall. Against the wall one floor below I could see the outdoor wash trough. From a little above the level of my room a wooden trellis that was completely overgrown with creepers sloped down to rest on the top of the wall. This made a safe haven for many birds and I enjoyed watching and listening to them. A teeny brown hummingbird had a home in among the vines, as well as a dove-grey bird smaller than a sparrow. And the ubiquitous pigeons hung around, one in particular looking rather forlorn. I thought he might be looking for a feed, so I put on the window ledge some crumbs from one of the delicious bread rolls that were left in the kitchen for guests’ breakfasts. After lunch, when I was having my siesta, I looked up to see him walking up and down on the window ledge only a metre away. I lay very still and after a thorough inspection of the inside of my room, he commenced to eat.
That day the pension’s proprietress phoned a travel agent she knew so that I could ask about buses to Cuzco, high in the Andes, which is, figuratively speaking, the jumping-off place for Machu Picchu. I wanted to see the ‘lost city of the Incas’ on my way through Peru. To my disappointment I was told that no buses went directly there. The recommended bus takes a circuitous route via the south. But the woman insisted that I should fly. ‘Everyone does,’ she said. Not me. My aim was to cross the continent overland, anyway I could, but preferably by river once I got over the barrier of the Andes.
I studied my map. The Andes are a formidable barricade that run the entire length of South America; there are few roads anywhere and none cross to the other side of the mountains in Peru. From Machu Picchu I would have to go south to La Paz in Bolivia from where there is a road that travels into the interior.
Deciding to travel to Machu Picchu by the unrecommended bus method, I took a taxi to the bus station to buy a ticket. When my driver neared downtown Lima he peeled off his taxi sticker from the inside of the windscreen and hid it under the dash mat. On the return journey another driver did the same thing in reverse. I presumed that they were unlicensed. To make up for this deficiency (or maybe because of it) they festooned their vehicles with religious medals, pictures and rosaries. Once again the taxi didn’t have any petrol and I had to buy some before we went far. I noticed that all drivers wore gloves, scarves and hats against the cold, but they kept all their windows down and froze the poor passenger.
Downtown Lima is no longer the social hub of the city, especially in the evening when the focus moves to the suburbs. The Lima area has been inhabited on a permanent basis for at least four thousand years but the city of Lima was founded in 1535 by Francisco Pizarro, who led the Spanish invasion of Peru. Lima’s main square is fringed by beautiful buildings, including a magnificent cathedral. Some of the buildings and houses have enclosed and shuttered Moorish fretwork boxes around their windows and small balconies that reminded me of Saudi Arabia. It was also a bit like San Miguel in Mexico but not as nice. I saw no plants and greenery as I did there. And the weather was putrid – foggy, smoggy, grey and depressing as well as cold. It is apparently like this for almost all of the year. The dense overcasting is called ‘neblina’ and is caused by the fact that, although Peru is near the equator, the chilly Humboldt current flows up from the south and supercharges the air with humidity without rainfall.
The bus station was very posh and upstairs there was a waiting room that beat the pants off scruffy old Greyhound. A trendy cafe, enclosed by glass, sported a big television set and comfy lounge chairs. At the ‘inflammation’ desk a lovely girl patiently extracted enough fractured Spanish from me to discover where and when I wanted to go. A first-class ticket to Ayacucho, which was about half-way to Cuzco and from where I could get another bus to continue, cost fifty sol – there were roughly three sol to an Australian dollar – and the bus left at the respectable hour of ten in the morning. The journey took eight hours, I think I was told. Four well-armed policemen guarded the bus station office, who knows why? But it reminded me of the high probability that I could get mugged in downtown Lima so I did not linger.
The return taxi driver couldn’t change even a small sol note. He told me to ask the moneychangers on the street corner when we reached Miraflores. They wouldn’t, the stinkers, but a nearby riot policeman saw my predicament and changed a note for me. Four Australian dollars got me an ‘all-in lunch’ of soup, fish, rice, salad and fruit juice at a cafe. Then I bought a four-page English newspaper for the outrageous price of two dollars fifty and went for a long walk up and down the main street in the afternoon sunshine to thaw out.
Next morning I went downtown to Lima’s main market. I wouldn’t have wanted to wander around this area too much and certainly not after dark. It was exceedingly grotty. Great piles of rubbish lay in the streets, apparently thrown there in the hope that they might be swept up. In the huge undercover market many stalls were still not open at half past ten. It seems the Peruvians don’t get going early – too cold I guess.
The cold also kept the meat market from smelling too horrible, but the fish market didn’t need a tropical climate to get a pong up.
I failed to find the woollen poncho I wanted to buy for my trip into the Andes. I had thought that Peru was the home of the poncho, but despite searching high and low I couldn’t find one for sale. I accosted a woman I noticed wearing one and she directed me to a shop but it offered only lairy tourist stuff made of cotton.
This day was a religious festival and, as it was also close to National Day, balloons and bunting in Peru’s red and white colours were draped everywhere possible. Behind the ornate gates and fence that surrounded the grounds of the presidential palace – which looked a bit like Buckingham Palace – a band resplendent in red, blue and much gold braid, straight out of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, played lustily while guards, who were also dressed pretty fancy, stood to attention on the palace steps and outside the gates.
I visited the cathedral. I thought I had seen it all in the way of ornate in Mexico, but this bulky edifice was absolutely stupendous. Inside everything was covered with ceramic tiles, even the pillars and arches. Altar after altar proceeded down both side walls and each one was covered with lights and flowers. It looked almost pagan and it was not hard to see the ancient animistic religion seeping through the Catholicism that took over. But I suppose the glut of glitter is preferable to the previous human sacrifices – certainly it would be if you had been on the day’s list. There were catacombs under the church that could be visited but, as it was a religious holiday, long queues of local people waited to enter them – I saw no tourists anywhere downtown – so I gave them a miss.
I left Lima on a cheerless morning and in drizzling rain. The bus was a surprise. It had a toilet, video and even heating and, after lunch, which had been served a la aircraft, the charming conductress passed out bingo cards and called several games. I didn’t win the prize – which was probably a washing machine anyway – but it was good practice for my Spanish numerals. The bus driver was encapsulated behind a screened door as on buses in Mexico. I was the only tourist on this bus ride (later I found out why) which, despite few stops, took ninety minutes longer than the promised eight hours to reach Ayacucho.
At first we travelled on the road that ran along the coast, a 2300-kilometre narrow band of some of the driest desert in the world. The Andes divide the length of Peru like a spinal cord and from the coast there is a difference in altitude of almost 13,000 metres within a distance of eight hundred kilometres. But due to the lack of roads into the mountains, the local culture, customs, crafts and lifestyles have been kept alive over the centuries.
Looking out from the window of the bus I decided that a more desolate landscape would be hard to imagine. Everywhere was grey-brown dirt that eventually rose up into the bleak, barren hills of the western Andes. There was no vegetation whatsoever. Everything was the same colour as the smoggy sky, even the occasional hovel and the poor villages of decrepit, square, flat-topped boxes with a few lines of washing flapping on their roofs.
We passed through two toll gates and then began hours of climbing ever higher. The mountains became pointed but they were still bare. Three hours from Lima we saw blue skies and left the frightful climate behind. Now and then there would be a house or two right on the edge of the road and there were many, many – far too many for my peace of mind – crosses and shrines that had been erected in memory of travellers who didn’t make it any further. But I loved the quaint green dunnies that guarded the rear of each house. Every one was identical, a tiny outhouse built of green corrugated iron sheets and with a chimney vent poking from its top. Later they were all red, possibly due to a change of district.
Higher and narrower the road wound ever upwards, until finally the mountains were covered in green grass that looked as smooth as moss from a distance. There was even an occasional tree. Higher still and the vegetation was gone and there was snow on the black, jagged peaks and in the crevices on the lee sides of the mountains. In the valley way below I saw an occasional farm house and, on the fields around it, llamas and goats. And once I spied a family living in a Beduin-style black tent with their livestock grazing about them. There were few running streams of water but I saw one river frozen to a huge sweep of solid ice that cascaded spectacularly over a wide stone ledge near the road.