Quito-Lima 11-14 setiembre

Quito – Guayaquil – Tumbes, Peru, – Lima.

Martes 11 de setiembre – viernes de 14 setiembre

Onward, to Lima and then Cusco, where I am planning to meet my friends, Paul and Mary Anne in mid September. I will spend more time in Ecuador and northern Peru upon my (northern) spring return northward.

Tuesday morning at 7 AM, I take a taxi ($14) to the Bus Depot on the south side of the city. I had been told that there was one bus company with a downtown terminal (which would have been a lot cheaper taxi ride). The taxi driver tells me that this terminal only has buses leaving at 6 AM so we go to the main terminal. My intuition says that he is making this up but I go along. On the way, I ask about the taxis in the city. He tells me that there are 15 000 taxis in the city. Because of the intense competition, he works from 5 AM to 8 PM six days a week. No wonder the drivers are so aggressive in attempting to get customers. I spend 8 hours on a bus to arrive at Guayaquil, because this is not a direct bus (many stops).  As we move down into the lowlands the temperature goes up. It is hot. Initially I see small plantations of papaya. Then some big cattle ranches with irrigated fields. An area of small sugar cane fields. Then some substantial rice paddies. Finally, some alarmingly huge (seemingly endless) banana plantations. I feel sick looking at the size of these plantations. They have made a desert out of this area. For some reason, the banana bunches on the trees almost all have plastic bags over them: Bug control? Speeding maturation? We also pass a large military base.

Guayaquil is the biggest city in Ecuador.  The hotel in Guayaquil is expensive ($25) and the lobby is a construction zone. I have to leap over stairs as they have just been plastered. I do not get much help trying to find out about buses for tomorrow as I had wanted to take an overnight bus tomorrow to Lima (and there is no internet here). However, eventually with some prodding, I get the phone book, find the number of a bus company and find out that the bus for tomorrow is full. So I go in the morning to the Bus Depot and buy a ticket for Piura, Peru ($13). I will have to hop from place to place until I find room on a long distance bus (much more comfortable since from Guayaquil I have about a 20 hour ride to Lima. The bus stops at the border (both sides) so the passengers can show passports and fill out forms. On the Peru side, they go through a lot of our bags (including my backpack). Then we are off but not for long. In the middle of the highway, still miles from the first Peruvian city of Tumbes, the bus stops and we are asked to get off and collect our bags. There is a fisherman’s strike and they are blocking the highway at numerous points. I walk with Luis, a retired civil servant from Quito who is on his way to visit his two sons and their families in Argentina. We, along with several others, get in a collectivo after crossing the barricades and get in to Tumbes. We check with a bus company and find that all bus travel is halted until the blockades come down. He and I check into a small hotel (a shared room works out to $7 each) and then go for a bite to eat. We are near the sea so I eat fish stew. It is very good. We change some money. I later wish I had kept the US money as I lost on the exchange and there are times when US cash is useful in Peru (like when paying for tours). I am finding it hard to talk to Luis as he does not make any concessions for my limited Spanish (like speaking slower and clearer). We check into some things to do for the next day in case the strike continues. It is not until reading a newspaper a month later that I realize what the strike is about. The government is trying to favour small scale fisherman who catch anchovies and sell them for human consumption while the current norm is large vessels catching them and turning them into fish meal for animal food and fish farm food. From what I have read, I am not with the fishermen on this one. I can get a tour of mangrove swamps in the area if we are further delayed but we are not. The barricades go down during the night.

In the morning, we buy overnight tickets to Lima.  The bus costs about $38 and will go from 1:30 PM to 9:30 AM or 20 hours. The seats are very comfortable, the highway is good. There is a sign above the one toilet on this double decker bus saying ‘Solo Urinario’. They have got to be kidding but they are not. Apparently you are supposed to get the driver to stop if you have a more substantial need. Seems a little crazy on a 20 hour ride. They serve two meals (supper and breakfast), both of which are not particularly appetizing, and make airline food (which I have never complained about) look amazing, but it is still appreciated.

These overnight double decker buses are common throughout South America and this will not be my last one. They do not stop much (unlike more local buses), do not rattle constantly, and they are amazingly inexpensive. One other big advantage of these buses (or not, depending on your viewpoint) is that shorter distance buses, buses that make more stops, and even city buses in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, let vendors on the bus and even more sophisticated panhandlers. While most vendors are just selling food (hot food,  snack food, fruit, ice cream, drinks), some are selling CDs, DVDs, information on holistic healing, and other things. Most of the latter, some of the snack food vendors, and even some people who play an instrument or who have a hard luck story, will spend five or ten minutes making a pitch and then make their way through the bus collecting money or selling whatever, and then getting off. I have seen this in Bogota and Quito and I will see it occasionally in Peru. I have even seen a blind man get on a bus in Quito, play some music, collect money from people and then get off. Quite extraordinary. Of course, I gave him some money.

In the evening, we pass through an oil field with many oil pumps pumping away and a large oil drilling camp close to the highway. When I wake up at dawn we are in a sand desert with sand dunes on both sides of the highway.  This continues until we reach Lima. The dunes are huge, one in particular I note that towers over the road. Clearly the dunes must migrate onto the highway and the sand must be cleared regularly. Hope to visit this area on my way north. 

Lima. Viernes 14 setiembre – domingo 16 setiembre 

Arrived in Lima around 10 AM.   S 12^o 3’  W 77^o 2’  Elevation 182 m.

Said goodbye to Luis who is continuing onward to Cordoba, Argentina. My taxi driver tells me there is no room at the hostel  I asked him to take me to due to a major Gastronomical Festival. I ask him to take me there anyway, and there is room. (An honest mistake or does he have a friend/relative with a hostel? I do not know.) Charged me about $5 and wanted another $1.20 tip which I gave him. The hostel was nicer than I have been used to ($19). After arriving, I showered, changed, relaxed, read, and watched tv (in English to take a break). I wander about the old part of town. I am only two blocks from the main square, Plaza St Martin, and there are 9 streets coming off the Plaza. After I have wandered around for a few hours and had some lunch, I head back to the hostel (they spell it ‘hostal’ in Spanish, and I know I keep switching). By this time, maybe partly due to lack of sleep on the bus, and due to the overwhelming nature of the city, I cannot remember which  of the streets my hostel is on. I use a few local landmarks I remember but I do not find it. After walking up and down several of the streets, I decide to do this systematically and walk all the streets that it might be down one after the other. Still no luck. I look up the address in my travel  guide (which is where I got the name of this hostel in the first place) and go there. The address leads me to the square itself not to one of the streets off of it. After chec king this out twice, I know that the address is wrong. Finally, I think back over all the landmarks I remember from when I first left the hostel, follow them and find it. I note two things. First, that the first street I came down when looking for the hostel was the right one but that I walked right by it as it is not very obvious from the street. Second, the name of the hostel was not the one in my book or that I gave the taxi driver, which is why the address in the book did not match the hostel. My hostel: Hostal Estrella de Belen. The one I thought I was going to was: Hostal Belen. 

Lima like all other South American cities, has big main plazas. Very beautiful and well kept. It is the cleanest of the 3 capitals I have visited. It has public baños but here you have to pay. In some areas the cobblestone streets are being redone.

I visited the Iglesia y Convento San Francisco. It contains catacombs where the bones (organized by bone type (skulls are all together) of 15 000 people who were buried here over the centuries, until the 1940s or so. I think the bone organization is a recent event. This church is gaudy with too many paintings, too much decorations, statues, gold, silver, crowns on Mary and Jesus statues, and the kind of praying and worship which I find hard to relate to.

I visited the Museo de la Inquisition. I learned that the Spanish Inquisition began in 1100s and the South American version lasted from 1570-1820. There is an inquisition chamber where judgement was passed and sentencing too. There are wax figures sitting around a big table at one end with an accused standing before them. I enter here with a  large tour group. Many want to have their picture taken standing beside the accused. I am not sure I really understand fully the mania of tourists and their cameras. Beyond that is a torture chamber with a stretching rack, another torture where a man was raised off the ground by ropes attached to his hands behind his back, stocks, and a water torture very much like the current US waterboarding. I am sure, like the recent Republican cabinet, the Inquisition did not consider this torture either. After that, we go down below to where prisoners were kept in cells hewed out of rock which are barely big enough to stand or lie down in.

On my way out, I am handed a slip of paper with a website for the Museo and I look it up. Among other things I learn that actually the Inquisition was more humane in its treatment of prisoners than civil courts and that relatively few people were found guilty. They do not mention the inhumanity of trying people for having thoughts different than the Church: a kind of thought police. A few weeks after this, I will see a mural in Cusco (southern Peru) which depicts many aspects of Inca history. Included here are depictions of Incas being tortured by the Inquisition. Clearly the artist did not consider this particularly humane.

I visit the Mercado Central nearby as well as the adjacent Barrio Chino (Chinatown). The Mercado is memorable. It is loaded with textiles, freshly butchered meat including all the offal, vegetables of many different kinds and one part where you can buy a meal very cheaply. Very different but one quickly becomes used to it. I wonder what happens to the meat and produce at the end of the day. When I ask, I discover that there are refrigeration units where some of the food goes while the rest is just covered up with tarps.

THE BIG CITIES I HAVE VISITED SO FAR.

Bogota  8.5 million (2009)(tied for 4^th biggest in SA.) Only 300 000 in the 1940s. Grew due to industrialization and civil war.

Quito. 2.7 million (2008). (2.1 million in 2001). Second biggest city in Ecuador after Guayaquil. Declared one of first two world cultural heritage sites by UN in 1978. HQ of Union of South American Nations.

Lima 8.5 million (2007). (Tied for 4^th biggest city in SA.) Most are campesinos who arrived in 80s and 90s to escape civil war.

It would seem like war in the countryside, as well as the forcing of people off land by agribusiness, companies seeking to build dams, or exploit mineral deposits (as is still currently happening in Colombia) are the main reasons that these and a number of other cities in South America and elsewhere have got so big so fast. From what I have seen, life in the country is harder physically but much more rewarding than life in the city (unless you are wealthy, and even then it depends on your criteria).

FOOD. I have not said much about food so far. I guess this is mostly because I eat to live, and not the inverse. My best meals have been where I have been served food by local campesinos  in their homes                (and these I will try to describe) and not in restaurants, and you can feel the difference. Local food prepared in the local way is really only to be found in the country and you only get poor imitations in restaurants, even good restaurants. So when in restaurants (I cook on my own when I can, too), I tend to go to inexpensive restaurants where local people go. In most of South America, the main meats are chicken, pork and fish (Amazon and the coast). In Peru, you also get alpaca and guinea pig, which I will talk about in a later blog. The main staples are: rice, cassava (in the Amazon), plantain (Amazon) and bread, with potatoes and maize added in various forms in Peru and Bolivia (this is where they come from). For fruits, the main ones are oranges (tangerines, limes, etc), bananas, papaya, mango, palta (avocado), pineapple, and tomato, with many other ones eaten in lesser quantities, many more varieties in the Amazon. The cloud forests and rainforests of the Amazon is where chocolate comes from too but unfortunately not too much is made of it here. Also, surprisingly little amounts of beans are served in all these countries unlike Mexico.

One thing I did not find time to visit in Lima were the Huacas, sacred places of the Lima Culture 200-700 AD. On the other hand, I did visit the Metro supermercado, much like any supermarket in North America (although not grossly over-abundant). It is embarrassing to admit, but it was a little like going home.