Saturday- Tuesday, 9-12 May
Lima
We said goodbye to our fellow Active Adventures travellers after last night’s dinner. Excepting Shirley and Don, who assembled with us in the still dark hotel lobby, at ten minutes to five in the morning.
We were booked on the 8am first flight out of Juliaca airport, a good one hour and ten minutes drive away.
We were all pretty frozen in the minibus, as whenever we asked the driver to turn up the heating, he turned up the fan and it got colder. After a while we gave up asking..
The airport is tiny – and not heated, so we managed to warm ourselves with a rather excellent coffee.
Arriving at the huge and busy Lima airport, we made substantial inroads on our 10,000 daily steps. However when we finally reached the luggage carousel, our bags arrived exactly at the same time.
Farewells to Don and Shirley, and found our pre-booked taxi to take us to our last hotel on our trip – the Estelar Miraflores.
Lima is a great city, with 43 distinct districts, where 12 million of Peru’s 33 million inhabitants live and work.
After a couple of weeks’ highly variable and piecemeal accommodation, it was a relief to check into a comfortable room. We were grateful for an early checkin, and were rewarded with rooms on the top accommodation floor. Floor 20 gave us stunning views over the busy cityscape, with its decorative murals and the Pacific Ocean.
Finding a delightful cafe/deli, we had a simple lunch, sitting in the outdoor warmth – something impossible in most of our previous locations!
Vivien and Lynne split off to indulge in a free walking tour of the Miraflores district, ending up at a trendy bar with a sought-after dessert, Suspiro à la limeña, and a Pisco Sour each!
Dinner at the Contraste Lima restaurant was pre-booked since a long time, in London. It was even more fancy than expected – with a gastronomic tasting menu of either 7 or 9 courses. Lynne had to order something separate due to her garlic intolerance, but Vivien and Peter gallantly embarked on the seven course journey.
The early start (and the earlier Pisco Sour) started to make itself felt, and together with the slow appearance of the courses, Vivien and Peter buckled and gave in, donating the garlic-free dessert to Lynne.
Day Two
We assembled at 9am in the lobby to say our farewells to Vivien, who was taking an Uber to the airport to travel onwards to a cousin in Santiago.
We breakfasted in the temporary breakfast room on the 5th floor, as the normal breakfast room on the panoramic 21st floor was taken over for Mother’s Day celebrations – a big event in the Peruvian calendar.
We indulged in a walk around Miraflores, high up along the dramatic shoreline. The breaking waves were enjoyed by surfers and the heights enjoyed by paragliders.
We stopped to take some pictures of Lynne with Paddington Bear, as Lynne and Vivien did the day before.
Finding ourselves a little short of Soles (the Peruvian currency), we went in search of an ATM that the tourist centre had advised us about. As Lynne and Peter had found, all the big banks charged quite a lot for ATM withdrawals. However, we were told to find a nearby Metro where there was supposed to be free ATM withdrawals.
Lynne went into ‘hunt mode’ and was rewarded with finding the rear parking lot entrance to the Metro supermarket (not transport station!) Pleased as punch, we withdrew a sufficient amount, with no fees.
A second, longer walk took us to the ‘cool vibe’ district of Barranco. Again, we followed the dramatic shoreline, passing over the busy motorway in a gorge below.
A late and light lunch in Barranco reminded us of the quiet areas of New Orleans’ French Quarter, Spanish architecture being the common theme. On the way back, Lynne couldn’t resist a purchase in a trendy-looking dress shop.
Not having secured a restaurant booking that evening, we retired to the hotel bar for bar snacks, with the view across the city on the 21st floor and the illuminated cross across the bay.
Day Three
We had booked a guided tour of the Lima City Centre, so were picked up by our guide and a “just big enough” car, at the tourist centre, near the hotel. We think we were sitting in the kids’ seats at the rear!
Picking up three others, we drove the busy, fast and very ‘vibrant’ traffic for half an hour to stop outside the Gran Hotel Bolivar, on Plaza San Martin.
In the middle of the Express Motorway were two lanes reserved for the Metropolitano bus service and its stations. This is the nearest Lima has to a Metro, linking 23 of its districts.
The hotel was indeed in the very grand mould, built in 1912, with guests spanning Ava Gardner, Walt Disney and Santana.
As the walk unfolded, we were briefed on some historic basics as we passed the oldest church in Lima, The Merced, and Lima Plaza des Armes, ending up at the Basilica and Convent of San Francisco.
We passed through the monastery quarters, with exquisite architecture, tiles and woodwork, a beautiful cloistered quadrangle, a Harry Potter reminiscent library and the monk’s dining room with a huge wall- size painting of The Last Supper, but with a round table and Peruvian food!
The catacombs housed the remains of over 20,000 people, some of them as a reward for working on the construction of the church and monastery. The internment of bodies is still practised; our guide witnessed one only the previous month.
Returning to our hotel, it was time to pack and get ready for our return to Europe. A last hurrah was to visit the coast and the popular and bustling restaurant, the Cevicheria Barra Maretazo. Service was as fast and jolly as the previous restaurants’ was slow and elaborate. We even found the seldomly encountered Peruvian dessert Suspiro à la limeña (as discovered earlier by Vivien), which we ordered one of plus two spoons.
Day of departure
Breakfast overlooking the Lima rooftops, an Uber ride for the drive, via long tailbacks on the under-dimensioned roads to the brand new Lima airport terminal, and we were away on our Iberia A330 flight.