Peru, 2010. Not as mysterious as it once was. We had the feeling we had missed the boat by about ten years. But every country is interesting in its own time. I would have loved to visit China in 1967, but it was also extremely interesting in 2007, and 2017. So too I hoped that Peru – discovered, modernising, and easy to travel around – would still inspire. We were making two trips. This first one was a quick run down the coast to get to Chile and into Bolivia, trying to avoid peak season. The second, in October 2010, would take us back north through the classic sites like Macchu Picchu and, we thought, the Nazca Lines. So for now, we were the 2 in 20 travellers who have visited Peru and not seen Macchu Picchu. But there was actually more to the country than just that…
Crossing a border on foot is always more fun than landing at an airport. It’s even better if, like the crossing between Ecuador and Peru at Macara, you actually cross over a bridge. This is a well-travelled crossing but it still has a frontier atmosphere. Leaving Ecuador, the border guard was a grumpy guy and his day was about to get a little bit worse. For one reason or another, I didn’t have the necessary piece of paper in my passport. He huffed and puffed, waved an arm around, clicked his tongue, and made a big show of ripping a copy from the pad and passing it out to me to fill in. He gave me my exit stamp and repeated the whole display for Yon, who also didn’t have the form.
We walked over the bridge, looking down at the river below, leading away into the pink sunset in a decidedly South East Asian looking landscape. Macara was far downhill from the rolling hills and cloudy ridges of Vilcabamba.
 Ladakh |
 Bolivia |
 Central Kyrgyzstan |
Approaching Peru, the contrast couldn’t have been greater. The border official, dressed in casual clothes, gave a big smile to Yon and when he was finished with her forms and stamps, offered another lovely smile and a very genuine sounding “Welcome to Peru! Have a wonderful holiday”. For me he went even further. I only have a few blank pages left in my passport which I save for full-page visas. I stuck some yellow post-its with “Please do not stamp this page” written in English and Chinese, along with a small 🙂 . He looked at this, smiled, and started to write on the yellow notes. “I do in Spanish, ok?” Yes, thank you very much, I smiled and nodded. He even did a little 🙂 which he seemed to enjoy. Then he squeezed the Peru entry stamp in between my innumerable Chinese ones, and wished me, too, a very happy holiday. A good start to Peru.
Northern Peru
After Piura, just a stop-over, we arrived in Chiclayo, a dusty and exhaust-fume plagued town near the ancient Moche civilization centres of Sipan and Tucume. The first thing we noticed about Peru was that the food here is a lot better than in Ecuador. Not just the famous ceviche (raw fish soaked in lime juice and served, obviously, cold) but good hearty soups, and freshly squeezed juices. We spent most of our time in Chiclayo chowing down on all this and more.
My favourite part of this area, though, was the giant ruins of an adobe pyramid complex at Tucume, and the related museum packed with Moche gold and other artefacts.
On the pyramid we met some young Chinese language students, studying in Lima. When they discovered I could speak Chinese, one of them said to her friends “oh, look, the foreigner can speak Chinese”. I pointed out that “here in Peru, we’re all foreigners”. That actually drew a laugh. My first Chinese joke – it only took three years…
Squashed into the microbus with their entire language class and a mix of locals, we had an interesting discussion about Peruvian attitudes to Chinese people. They said they didn’t suffer any racism, and mostly Chinese people (at least those from China) were respected in Peru. Walking on the street they’d often hear “Chinita!” but one young student pointed out that this was the same as when Chinese people call out “Laowai!” (foreigner) at people like me. She said she was surprised to find that most things you can buy here are made in China (welcome to the modern world, kiddo), and was oddly outraged that a toothbrush should cost four dollars. They were nice kids, and we wished them well as the microbus bounced back into Chiclayo and disgorged us in a dusty alley.
Lima
The grey foggy haze that seems to envelop Lima around the clock is known as “the donkey’s stomach ache”. It’s a fitting description for the mood it leaves you in. All the Limeños who learned our next stop was Arequipa said it was lovely and they wished they could move there. The appalling traffic was a constant complaint; for one taxi driver it was a long riff that culminated in him kicking us out at the wrong end of our street, halving the agreed fare, and driving off because he just couldn’t take it any more. It’s the first city we’ve visited in a long time that makes us yearn for the appealing climate and fresh air of Beijing.
Lima did have some beautiful colonial architecture and lovely churches, cloisters and catacombs. We stayed downtown, rough and gritty compared to the more popular Miraflores area. But like Chiclayo, the focus of our short visit quickly became food.
First stop was Chinatown – not because we miss Chinese food (we don’t) – but because Lima is renowned for its “Chifa”, a South American word which seems to mean both “Chinese restaurant” and “the kind of food they serve in Chinese restaurants in Peru”. We assumed it derives from the Mandarin “chi fan” – to eat – but who knows?
Like Chinatowns everywhere, Lima’s is gritty, crowded, and actually not very appealing. Fortunately it’s also small so we very quickly scoped out the options. Suddenly Yon heard some Cantonese on the street, and she swung around to see who spoke it. The older woman tried to point out a restaurant to us, and in the end just said “follow me”. It turned out to be her own place, a small, pretty dingy, garishly lit restaurant just like a million others around the world. There was a young Chinese waiter, and he revelled in the opportunity to speak in Cantonese to someone roughly his own age. His experience was a distinct contrast to that of the language students we met up north. A loose translation:
“This place is really dangerous. After 9 pm you can’t walk on the streets. Gangs of kids will just come and rob you. After I’d been here only a few months, someone robbed me with a knife. And then a few months later, I was on the bus and this really fat lady got on. I moved back to let her past and she picked my pocket. I never go out on my own any more.”
We made a mental note to leave before 9. The food came, including a complimentary wonton soup for me, courtesy of the nice lady who’d brought us here. It wasn’t amazing but it wasn’t bad – I’ve had worse, even in Hong Kong. Our waiter friend continued chatting to Yonnie about all kinds of things. Mostly, he just seemed keen to talk. Most successful Chinese, he said, had professional jobs and lived out in Miraflores (the nice part of Lima), or were students, so he had few Cantonese-speaking friends nearby. It seemed a fairly lonely existence.
We were in Lima for the 28th of July, a day of national celebration. Red and white bunting was everywhere, and if Target ever moves in to Peru it will have great brand recognition, because the red-white-red roundel on Target stores was also everywhere to be seen – from shops, to hotels, to people’s lapels.
The President’s motorcade took him the five or six blocks from the city square up to the Congress so he could deliver a speech, leaving most of downtown Lima sealed off to cars and pedestrians. Hundreds of young military cadets lined the streets waiting to form an honour guard. Some of their rifles were held together with tape.
That evening there was a fireworks display. We had a fine view of it from the roof of our hotel overlooking the beautiful Church of San Francisco. Happy Birthday Peru!
Musee Larco and the Pornographic Antiquities
Lima has a few excellent archeological museums in addition to its colonial heritage. We visited the Musee Larco, partly for its collection and partly for its excellent restaurant.
Among the pre-Columbian artefacts and gold was a remarkable collection of Chimu-civilization pottery with graphic depictions of sex. It’s believed to have been used for philosophical and moral education, rather than technical instruction or visual stimulation.
Those pictures follow underneath the images of the museum’s other amazing artefacts. They’re graphic, so don’t scroll further if you don’t want to.
Apologies – but no liability – to anyone who took offence.
