Our Lima hotel is in Miraflores, one of the Southern coastal districts. This morning Andrew and I pulled on our running gear and headed out to explore the area as it awoke – my favourite time of day in a city. We were greeted with clean wide paths along the top of the cliffs, dotted with sculptures, and surrounded by beautiful views of the Pacific Ocean.
There are constant reminders that this is an earthquake zone, with designated safety areas in public places, gates like this one that stop people heading down from the cliffs in the event of a tsunami, and signs to direct people up from the beachside highway in an emergency. Hopefully the building standards take care of the rest…
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It was fabulous to see hundreds of other runners out, although they seemed much more focused than our Brisbane counterparts. Despite my best attempts to extract a ‘buenos dias’, no one seemed keen except for Paddington Bear, who apparently hails from this part of the world.
This trip is an opportunity to prepare the girls a little more for their own travels, so we left todays sightseeing itinerary to Emma. She opted for the Convento de San Francisco (Monastery of Saint Francis), built in the 17th Century and designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1991. This area of Lima is much older and has a lot more character than Miraflores.
The site is a church and monastery, and also contains a world-renowned library of over 25,000 ancient texts. There is a famous painting of the Last Supper with a Peruvian flavour of guinea pigs (the national dish), potatoes and chillis, along with many other significant artworks.
Beneath the church are catacombs containing the skulls and bones of around 25,000 people who were buried there until 1808. The catacombs were discovered in 1943, and have remained standing through major earthquakes, so apparently they are one of the safest places in Lima. Priests are still buried here.
Plaza San Martin is about 1km away, and pays homage to Jose de San Martin who was an Argentine General, and leader of the struggle for independence from the Spanish empire. We took the opportunity to sit in the sun for a while beside a jacaranda, and listen to a local busker’s rendition of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ Under the Bridge which took us back to our teenage years.
The day pushed my Spanish to the limits with a 4 items for 1 at a local bakery, and dealing with Movistar, the mobile phone provider to get a SIM. A couple of hours of piles of paper, passports, inky fingerprints, and multiple counters to get a $2 SIM made Telstra look like a customer service superstar! The phrase ‘No hablo Espanol muy bien’ (I don’t speak Spanish very well) got a serious work out, but it wouldn’t have been any faster if I was local.
To close the day, we met our tour group. Daniel, the Chief Experience Officer, is an Inca warrior from Cusco and is clearly a wealth of knowledge on the Inca Trail and the Cusco region. The rest of our group is made up of a couple + two single travellers from Canada, and two friends from Connecticut. No other kids, a range of activity levels, and it seems that I have the most extensive grasp of Spanish?!?!
Tomorrow we head to Cusco where the real adventures begin!
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