Day 7 - Cuzco - Lima

Loreto Boutique Hotel shares an old colonial home with Starbucks and a hostal.

True to his word, Eugenio is at the hotel at 8 a.m.  Even before.  He carries our bags down to the cab for us - ever the gentleman - and talks us all the way to the airport for a third of the price we paid on the trip in. And then poses with me for a farewell photo.  I wish I knew how to send him a copy.
       The flight to Lima is short, but we are nonetheless served an esnaquey, as we will be on all flights taken, regardless of the hour. When we arrive, the hotel taxi I reserved is there - the first time I’ve ever done that - and the driver ends up being similar to Eugenio but minus the deep resonant voice.  Amerigo - a fitting name for tourists from the United States - also offers to drive us to our plane tomorrow, which is very convenient, given the extremely late hour of our flight!
       Lima is as grey as it was when we flew in from Miami... and like it is every winter for four months evidently. Neither my daughter nor I could live with that.  Amerigo explains during the ride that federal law requires that restored colonial buildings be painted in lively colors - turquoise, lime green, sunny yellow - to counteract the greyness. When federal law recognizes the problem, it must really be a problem!

Gran Hotel Bolivar

       The hotel is a grande dame of the 1920's, temporary home to visiting stars from Clark Gable to Mick Jagger.  We’ve been given a suite for some reason, so each of us will have a separate room, although we choose to congregate in mine, where the TV is.  It’s an old TV set, not a flat screen as it has been everywhere else, and that’s indicative of the hotel:  a grande dame but an aging one whose hall carpets are frayed and whose toilet seat has been painted to match the robin’s egg blue tiling, long out of date.

       But I get ahead of myself.  The room won’t be ready until 2 (sound familiar?), so we cross the marble foyer with the stained glass cupola overhead to the majestic bar.  Time for a pisco sour - to compare it with the others we’ve tasted.  When it comes, it’s a doozie!  The waiter seems a bit surprised the gringas would order a grande instead of a small, but hey, we’re on vacation, especially my daughter, who flies back to work in just 36 hours.  The result:  a lot of giggling after the bellboy shows us to our room... and then a two-hour nap, which sets things right.
       We change and go for a walk before night falls but fail to find the museum we’re looking for.  There are many commercial buildings and people waiting for buses, but we see no green lawns or museum-looking buildings, so we turn back.  Evidently we should have forayed on for one more long block and we would have found it.  That is part of the pattern of no-museuming that we seem to have fallen into, both in Lima and in Cuzco.  Besides, it’s getting late and we’re walking in or near a neighborhood Amerigo warned us las seňoritas shouldn’t venture into at night... and Lima does have a reputation for being rather dangerous.

     So back we go toward the hotel, then past, headed for the main Plaza de Armas.  But we’re soon stymied by closed iron gates manned by police with attack dogs.  No way through on streets to the left or the right, we find, so we go back to the hotel for a dinner suggestion, being hungry by then (no food since our esnaquey on the plane, just the pisco sour) and night is starting to darken the already gloomy sky.  The idea of bar food doesn’t appeal (more about that later) and the desk clerk’s suggestion nearby turns out to be a sports bar - at least in name - so back up the main pedestrian street we go - again!  

       This time the gates are open, the police and dogs gone.  Still, the elusive “street of restaurants” we were told about is unfindable.  Past 9 p.m. we finally settle on a small place of simple appearance (and a gynormous TV!).  My daughter gets her ceviche, me a huge plateful of rice with crayfish.  Delicious, and copious even by American standards.  It takes time to eat such a meal.  The other diners leave, table by table, the doors are locked and the lady behind the cash register comes out to sit and watch the program. Feeling bad about keeping her up, we soon pay and leave the woman to her life.
       One last walk down the pedestrian street which has become familiar, still bustling with people, to the grande dame hotel on the still-noisy Plaza San Martin.  And bed.

Plaza San Martin, with  Martin himself in the center, and the Llama Mama below him

P.S.  San Martin threw the Spanish colonists out of Peru.  A grateful nation built a large plaza in his honor, with an enormous likeness of him in the center.  But I like the smaller statue below him:  the Motherland.  Its Spanish sculptor was asked to give her a crown of flames (llamas) but somehow assumed the llama requested was the llama he knew as the emblematic animal of Peru.  So he dutifully put a small one, as requested, smack on the top of her head.  A comic misunderstanding for the translator in me, but an endearing one.