Lima; Central Park, Monastery and Ossuary

Thu 20 July 2006

Thursday we decided to be a bit more adventurous and go see some sites. We took a taxi out to Lima’s central park, which happens to be by the presidential palace with guards everywhere.

This is one of the best focal points to see a lot of neat buildings and tourist sites within just a couple of blocks radius. We eagerly walked up and down streets touring museums, monasteries, unique restaurants and just absorbing the great views and feel of the country.

We visited the San Franciscan Monastery and took the full tour. It was an AWESOME monastery with a bone ossuary beneath it that I adored! There were all these great tunnels and the bones had been organized and collected into patterns.

The highlight was a well that had been filled with skulls and leg bones because they had run out of room for large bones in the rest of the ossuary. It was extremely cool!

The taxi ride back from the central park to our hotel was very likely the most death defying ride I've ever had in my life. We hadn’t set up for a ride back, so we had to flag someone down on the street. That alone was dangerous, but this particular driver was aggressive to the edge of deadly.

He took a different route home than we’d taken with our original driver, maybe thinking he could shave off a few minutes of time. But instead it took us through several open market areas where there were more people on the street than cars, yet apparently even the cars were too slow for our driver.

This driver was insane! If a car in the lane ahead of him slowed down, he would squeeze his car between that car and the buildings, running people out of his way, barely slowing down and if he did have to slow down he would reach out the window and hit the other cars as he passed.

He hit two other drivers and kept going, yelling and swearing as he passed. He only slowed down when he was bumping pedestrians out of the way in crowded areas. Pedestrians in more open areas were in danger of their lives! He nearly flattened several people that barely managed to jump out of the way in time, including a small boy that came within millimeters of getting completely smashed.

At that point I could actually see Jason rise up several inches out of his chair preparing to beat the living crap out of the driver for being so careless. Jason is very protective of kids, even if they aren’t his own and I know he would have ended up in jail for beating that driver senseless if he’d hit that little boy.

Despite the fender benders and curses of bruised pedestrians we did manage to get back to the hostel in one piece.


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