This is an attempt at chronicling our wayward adventures through South America. We have been somewhat lazy up to this point, so this will be an (un)chronological account of these travels as we catch up to the present.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

Lima Part 2: Boston is not the only great bean town on a coast in the Americas

There's something incredible that happens when travel gives way to accommodation. There's a peaceful lull in the pace of action and a person gets to take a minute to shake themselves in their own flesh and see what time has wrought. For me, that morning in room four of the Stop and Drop hostel in Lima, the results of this assay were greasy, generally under-maintained, and deeply creased with the lines indicative of clothing worn for days as it gradually distorts. Everything I wore peeled-off with a perceptible grip reminiscent of the sensation that one feels in removing thin plastic from food that has been thoroughly packaged, and I recall doing a great deal of stretching, shuddering, yawning and rubbing.

In an attempt to push this reinvigoration regimen to its logical zenith, I gathered all of my necessary artifacts and made my way to the men's bath. The shower was, at first glance and with growing intensity as my investigation continued, an object of profound mystery, and strangeness from showers I had known previously. The bathroom itself was a somewhat dirty, wet-floored location with cubicles formed at odd angles inside a superstructure with ceilings unnecessarily high for its current purpose as communal bathroom.

Unlike the electric fixtures of Quito (which require, at once, both adept maneuvering to find a rate at which water is heated fast enough to provide warmth and wetness simultaneously and an iron will to remain below a stream of water emanating from a cheesy plastic device attached to outlets of both the water and the power systems of a given building by shoddy looking pipe and even shoddier looking wiring that is producing thin wisps smoke and a vague scent of burnt electrical tape) this was a return to water heated elsewhere, presumably by gas, and pumped to many locations on demand. The head of this shower was merely a rounded, metal cap with a single circular opening about half an inch in diameter, and so the shower unleashed what amounted to a warm pee, aimed in a fixed direction, at approximately eye-level. To describe it in words, and think back on it now, it seems nearly impossible to explain the refreshment that such an obviously flawed device, such a vague and degraded facsimile of an idealized form of the shower, provided me with that morning. It was amazing.

Having both bathed and broken fast, we went out into the city to take care of a few things (read: eat), to bask in the pure coastal-ness of everything, and to have some words with the good people at LAN about changing our return date to Lima and making our newly-gotten bus tickets usable. We began with LAN, which was only a few blocks away on a street filled with banks and gigantic gringo restaurants.

I have been having some difficulty reconciling the jokes we made about them at the time, and my overall memory of them as something generally helpful and innocuous into a fitting description of the ladies of LAN offices throughout the continent. By this point in the trip we had had roughly three contacts with computer-manning LAN employees (ladies) during the course of our airport check-ins and in Piura, and now in Lima it became humorously apparent that there was a sort of aesthetic division of labor in play throughout the airline. Women with a blonde dye-job, a particularly flashy style of dress or hair or adornment, and men were placed in positions of flight attendance, whereas, their other homelier comrades, were dressed in the trademark vests and ties of McDonald's management everywhere and made-up to look roughly like Frieda Kahlo with her hair pulled back really tightly.

We entered the office, smiled at the guard, took a number and were amused to find ourselves classed, for the purpose of this interaction, as disabled and our number called at the designated handicapped window. The Friedas also, seemed to chuckle nervously to one another when they noticed us noticing this and talking about it with one another in Spanish. Continuing in this vein we goofed our way through our requests, and managed to get the tickets changed by one day for a mere fifty bucks each. Galapagos was saved for now, we thought, and left the air conditioned office for the hot street again.

Once outside again, we decided that the focus for the rest of that day ought to be Lima, because despite our foiled Nazca hopes, we planned to leave it as soon as we could, and after that day we'd only really have about five days left before our scheduled flight to Buenos Aires.

We strolled in the sun, got some sidewalk fruit, had a conversation with an old man who had augmented his begging routine by adding a young retarded boy who made trinkets and passed them out to everyone in a great and weighty showcase of pathetic generosity, surveyed the nearby parks,

From 2010-02-26


ate some lunch,

From 2010-02-26


and then promptly fell asleep in our room. It was an involuntary but extraordinary six-hour siesta, and afterwards we somehow managed to get more food

From 2010-02-26


before going back to sleep.

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