But I get ahead of myself.
Day 0 - Around 3:00 p.m. Thursday afternoon I realized I had forgotten to check in to our flights and print off the boarding passes. Our flights are booked on LAN Airlines - never heard of this Latin/South American airline when I booked the tickets months ago. I was a little leery - it was rated 6 out of 10 (some issues with losing luggage - yikes!). BUT - both flights are non-stops (yey!) from Dulles (boo!) and a couple hundred $$ cheaper than any other airline (yey!).
The one time I had to contact LAN airlines directly did not help the situation: the voice menu sounded like it was on a tape on a 20 year old answering machine AND it was in Spanish. Well I thought it was Spanish, but it could have been just garbled. And when I finally got through to a human, his English was borderline.
Not warm and and fuzzy here.
So when I tried to check into the LAN airline website - and saw that it was redirected to LATAM Airlines , this wasn't helping me. Apparently LATAM (an Ethiopian airline I'd never heard of) bought the Latin/South American airline.
Whatever, I log in, find the flight. Get past the first couple of screens, but once I get to the seat selection - which it skips because it rightly detects that our seats have already been selected - the site hangs.
Since I was using Chrome, I changed to Firefox. Same problem. Switched to Safari - ah hah! Progress! But not to "print boarding passes". No no, it goes to another screen where it tells me to select seats for a flight from Washington DC on September 20 to Lima. But we're not flying to Lima from Washington DC to Lima on September 20. We're flying from Puerto Maldonado, Peru to Lima, Peru.
Never mind. I gave up. Not helping the non-warm fuzzy feeling.
BUT the drive to the airport was traffic free (yey!), parking the car at the Holiday Inn was super easy (yey!) and we were at the gate with plenty of time to have dinner (yey!).
Then boarding started late, none of the broadcasted instructions to the passengers were repeated in English....
Actually, even though we left a half hour late, it was a pretty easy flight (dinner at 1:30 a.m., an inedible breakfast at 5:30 a.m.) and we somehow arrived a half hour early. And we both managed to get some sleep.
We had no clue how far the hotel was from the airport (even though the name of the hotel is the Costa del Sol Aeropuerto), but we expected to be picked up by a car or van or bus.
But we were met by Rolf, who walked us out of the airport with our bags still on the airport cart, then walked us across the street - which is when he remarked that in Lima the striped crosswalks were for decoration only, though fairly obvious by that point - and right into the hotel. LIterally across the street from the airport.
That was easy!
So far so good!
Day 1
Day 1 is always some kind of weird continuation of Day 0, and today was no exception. At the hotel, of course our room is not ready and won't be till 2:00 p.m. Conundrum. What do we do until then?
First - have an edible breakfast at the hotel.
Second - get money.
Third - ask the concierge what to do. Very helpful fellow.
What we ended up doing - ordering a taxi to take us to the Museo de Artes in downtown Lima. We figured this is a place that our tour would never take us to. We also arranged for the cab to pick us up at an appointed time and place and bring us back. The concierge suggested Uber - except we've never used it.
Our taxi arrived The driver introduces himself as Richard. We proceed to have a highly entertaining conversation for the next hour or so as he weaves in and out of traffic. The conversation is a mixture of broken English on his part and very bad Spanish on our part. But it was so awesome - he pointed out things along the way, he talked about the poor neighborhoods in Lima, about the bad presidents Peru has had over the last couple of decades...
He dropped us off in front of the museum with an agreement to be picked up in front of the Grand Hotel Bolivar in Plaza San Martin. No problem!
The museum was great - took us only about 90 minutes to see the whole thing, but it was comprehensive: From pre-Colombian art (below is a monkey-motif jug)
Through the Rennaisance to Modern Art. We noted that the Rennaisance paintings were a bit different from what we are used to seeing in European art museums. For example, this painting depicted the Holy Trinity in a way we've never seen before - a three-faced Jesus:
Or this one, showing a rather graphic illustration of the Circumcision of Christ (can't recall ever seeing anything ever referring to Jesus' Brit Milah before):
Once we were done with the museum, we headed towards the Grand Hotel Bolivar. First, a photo of the museum grounds:
We did have a map that given to us by the concierge. So off we went, playing frogger with the traffic at every intersection (and there are many many many HUGE intersections in Lima), heading in the general right direction.
As is tradition for Day 1 in a city where we've never been on our own before and where we don't really speak the language, we a realized after a while that we weren't sure we were actually headed towards Plaza San Martin.
As is tradition, we started asking for directions - the people in Lima are very nice, always offering directions. The key was understanding the instructions. This didn't go so well, though we knew we were continuing in the general right direction and all we had to do was "go down this street and make a right". Which we did several times, wandering into dead ends, requiring us to turn around and try again.
Though this might sound ridiculous, getting lost is great - we get to stumble across things we'd never see on an organized tour. Like this beautiful church:
This is a panoramic shot, which is why you see bits and pieces of cars as they zoomed by.
I think somewhere we have the name of this church , but it doesn't matter. It's a really pretty blue!
When we finally found Plaza San Martin, we were pretty sure we had gone All. The. Way. around it (because we kept making a right) without actually hitting it.
Never mind, time for lunch in the cafe inside the Grand Hotel Bolivar.
As is (a new) tradition, Day 1 in Peru means Aji de Gallina and a ceviche for lunch. And Andy has his Pisco sour. Here's Andy with the sea bass ceviche and the traditional Pisco sour.
The food was excellent. We had an entertaining time communicating with the server - even on Day 1 we can see an improvement in our rudimentary ad-lib Spanish skills.
The Grand Hotel Bolivar was built in 1924. It's a beautiful building. This is the dome that is the lobby ceiling:
And by the registration desk is a Model T Ford:
Right on the dot of 3:00 p.m., the taxi came to pick us up. This time it was Pepe, who knew no English at all as far as we could tell. Watching him drive was a bit nerve wracking, to put it mildly. Seems like most road rules are suggestions at best, unless there's a traffic cop in the middle of the intersection.
Back at the hotel our room was ready. We're only here for one night.
Tomorrow begins our jungle adventure - 3 nights at a lodge in Puerto Maldonado in the tropical rain forest, where the temperatures will hover in the high 80s/low 90s, the humidity will be close to 100% at any given time, the mosquitos can't wait for the next batch of human victims to show up, and there's no electricity in the bungalows where we will be living. No A/C. Mosquito netting. Hot water courtesy of solar panels, so if there's no sun, there's no hot water. You get the picture.
After 3 days of 100% humidity and no A/C, I will probably find out the answer to the question:
Just how big can my hair get?
As a side note, there's wifi only in the main lodge, so I don't know if I'll be able to post a blog every day.
No electricity, no A/C, no wifi....O. M. G.
Hasta la vista, mis amigos!
Very entertaining, Amy. Andy might write an interesting blog as well but I bet it wouldn't be half as funny and witty as yours ;-). Do let us know if the humidity is any worse than Maryland. I'd be surprised as it's probably better. I can't handle humidity anymore. Don't get captured by head hunters in the rainforest or you won't be able to make your next blog installment. Have fun! (Steve in CA)
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