Peru! Finally....

Sorry it's taken so long for me to post about the Peru trip, I have been a bad blogger lately! So be prepared for a whole bunch of Peru posts as I take you day by day through our trip!

Mon 17 July 2006

Riding on buddy passes meant we had to leave home a little early just in case we didn't catch a plane the first day. Sure enough, we didn't get a plane Monday and had to crash at a Best Western overnight.

Tue 18 July 2006

The flight out to Peru was packed about as full as they could get it. They loaded every single seat in that plane, and even filled first class up with children, which I've never seen happen before. It was a long flight, but to make it worse a volcano erupted directly in our flight path forcing the plane to go clear out and around that area and making us arrive several hours late.

The Lima airport was completely packed with drivers claiming to be taxis, at least two or three hundred of them packed shoulder to shoulder just outside the arrival zone. We'd heard LOTS of stories of people accepting a ride from one of these drivers. Many of them only made it a block from the airport before the driver pulled over and took every single possession they owned and left them on the side of the road without clothes, shoes or a penny to their name.

Without their passports or anything to identify themselves, victims had to spend weeks at the embassy trying to verify who they were before finally managing to get back to their home countries without ever seeing anything of Peru other than the airport and embassy.

We knew the risks, so we had called our hotel before we got on the plane in Atlanta and had them send a taxi meet us. The trick was actually finding OUR taxi among the hundreds of drivers out there trying to pull us away. Also, because our plane was late, we were very worried that our taxi may have given up and left us!

Jason had the rest of us wait out of the reach of the drivers near the airport security while he attempted to find our taxi. He's a big guy, and speaks Spanish fluently, so he had the best chance of getting through the crowd and back to us safely.

It took us almost half an hour to find our taxi driver, and I'm not sure who was more relieved, him or us! He must have been waiting there for several hours and been getting close to giving up on us. With his experienced guidance we made it through the parking lot to his car and gratefully piled inside.

As we pulled out of the airport our driver powered up all our windows and locked the doors. We all kind of looked at each other uncomfortably, wondering if we'd been duped into the wrong taxi, but our driver quickly explained that it was not safe for us to drive around with the windows down or the door unlocked. He also suggested that we take off any jewelry, watches, and even our sunglasses which might tempt thieves.

He explained that this portion of Lima was very dangerous, and that it wasn't unheard of for thieves to snatch items from cars that were stopped at street lights or as passengers were loading or unloading.

The area around the airport looked like a burned out city, a lot of the buildings were boarded up, missing doors, windows and even entire walls and ceilings. Broken glass, razor wire, armed security on the streets. There was shocking poverty, and it was easy to understand why the crime rate might be so high in this area.

As we drove the scene gradually became more and more metropolitan. We were passing out of the ghettos and into the nicer portion of Lima. We parked across the street from the Loki Hostel and quickly unpacked our luggage. It was very late, and we were being watched closely by the teenage locals loitering on the street.

My super sexy husband protectively placed himself between myself and the locals as we walked up to the locked and barred entrance of the hostel. The taxi driver rang a bell positioned beneath a security camera near the door and someone on the other end of that camera unlocked the door for us to enter.

There was a long hallway ending in a wide stairway, which we dutifully began to climb yet were quickly halted and awed by the giant stained glass mural near the top! It was huge, and absolutely gorgeous!

Sadly my camera was currently buried deep in my bag, and we were all exhausted. Eagerly we completed our climb, checked in at the front desk, and retreated to our rooms.

Despite parties all night long on the top floor, the music was muffled, and I was asleep the minute my head hit the pillow.

Next: Miraflores Peru >>