Living in Peru : your everyday companion

Through the detailed travelogue Audre and Dimitri are keeping of their trip to Peru, we experienced their exciting and interesting visit to Arequipa. In this next travelogue, they have invited us to join them on their continued journey through Peru. Accompany Audre and Dimitri as they travel through Nasca, Ica, Paracas and then to Lima. If you missed out on the first part of their trip, click here.

Luckily, a man at the gas station in Camaná pointed out that there was a problem with our Thule bike rack. One of bike holders had lost 2 bolts and was practically falling off. Fortunately one of the bolts was sitting on the roof of the car. The other bolt was lost. Dimitri spent about 2 hours taking the racks apart and putting them back together, using a bolt from the back for the front piece where the one had been lost. (We had used a Thule bike rack in Australia when we toured on paved roads for 26,000 km. We had no problems there. We also used a Thule bike rack for 4 years in Europe. In Chile, Argentina and Perú, we figure the roads have been bumpier and we must check our bolts periodically.)

When we finally got to the Hotel Puerto Inka Resort, we were delighted and relieved. It is a fairly basic set of rooms but the bay is idyllic and remote (at the end of a short, not too bumpy, dirt road). There are ruins where the Inca runners lived when they fished and salted the catch before running up to Cusco with it. We spent a delightful evening looking out at the bay from our veranda (having the wine and cheese that Audre had packed) in candlelight (that was also in our kit) with mosquito coils (also in our kit). Our room cost S/.189.50 (about US$60) and was worth it (although we learned later they have packages with meals that would have been cheaper). Our dinner was very good fish for S/.50 (about US$16 with our own wine).

We spent one night in Puerto Inca and the next day drove to Nasca to see the lines in the sand created by the Nasca and Paracas people between 900 BC and AD 600. What these lines mean and why they were made has spawned numerous theories, particularly since they can only be appreciated from the air. We took an AeroCóndor flight for US$40 (charged in dollars) and took some surprisingly good photos.

It was early enough after our flight to keep driving towards Ica. We stopped at the Ocucaje winery (where most of Perú’s wine comes from). Lonely Planet said “the winery now has an upmarket resort hotel”. It was in an awful state of disrepair so we didn’t stay.

We drove on to the Hotel Las Dunas Sun Resort. It was very full and the prices were high. When we got there at about 6 p.m., we saw standard rooms that were not comfortable and so Dimitri started negotiating with the front desk for the suite. The manager joined in and when he offered us a suite, that had a private courtyard with a Jacuzzi in it, for a price less than we had offered, we took it. The negotiated price for the suite was S/.330 (about US$100), with breakfast and service.

Unfortunately, the Jacuzzi had no hot water and had to be filled with hot water from a garden hose. We decided to go to dinner first and use the Jacuzzi after dinner. Dinner in the main dining room was a buffet for Valentine’s Day and was a circus. We found a smaller room and had 2 waiters for ourselves. (At breakfast the next day, we ate with all of the people and saw some Americans from a former era who looked like they believed in the creation of the Nasca Lines by extra-terrestrials. One of them looked like Colonel Sanders in his totally white suit, long white beard and waist-long white hair.)

Our dinner was okay and blessedly calm. When we returned to our suite, the water had drained out of the Jacuzzi. Oh well, we left the next day for Paracas without a Jacuzzi event.

In Paracas we were going to stay a week for our beach experience. It wasn’t meant to be. The Libertador-affiliated Hotel Paracas Reserva Natural could only accommodate us for one night. The price was exorbitant (S/.609.32 or US$191.07) for their one ocean view room, Room 201 and we weren’t in a position to negotiate.

The hotel is beautifully situated, obviously popular, but is tired-looking. We were going to use the hotel’s kayaks; fortunately did not because the wind came up in the afternoon and it would have been very unpleasant. Instead we took a walk along the shoreline. We met some lovely women from Lima who were renting a house on the beach. They were going to help us find a house to rent for a week but could not. This was, after all, high season. After our walk, we booked the hotel’s outdoor Jacuzzi and had a nice warm soak.

Perú’s tourist site lists Paracas as one of Perú’s main mountain biking areas. It is a sandy, desert area and had we stayed longer we would have taken the recommended route. Probably that ride would have ruined our bikes with sand.

Dinner at the hotel was okay but crowded. The next day, before leaving, we went on a boat tour of the Isla Ballestas (it cost US $80 for the 2 of us). Called the “poor man’s Galapagos,” it was great and we got some good photos.

For lunch we stopped in Pisco on our way to Lima. We couldn’t find El Portal del Pisco which was in Lonely Planet so we went instead to As de Oro's Restaurante and had a delicious cebiche mixto with fried yucca chips for S/.51.45 our US $16.18.

We arrived in Lima around 4:30 p.m. and started our long-term accommodation search.

Dimitri had read Lonely Planet on Lima and had done a lot of research online to identify accommodations that would be comfortable for us for a month. We like to have a kitchen so we can have a salad for lunch or a light dinner from time to time. It’s also great to have a kitchen so we can buy food to try in the local markets. We also wanted to have a separate bedroom and living room in Lima. Dimitri localized our search to the suburbs of Miraflores and San Isidro.

Audre was doing the driving north to Lima; the divided highway into the city that started about 100 km south astounded us. It was easy but Audre turned over the wheel to Dimitri outside of town, not wanting to deal with the undisciplined Peruvian drivers in the city. The first two apart hotels we looked at weren’t for us but we liked Sol de Oro Suites Apart Hotel. Dimitri negotiated a rate of US$132 per day for the first week and then US $100 thereafter for apartment no. 904. We had a glimpse of the ocean and an otherwise open view, not being close to any other building. The TV was moved from the bedroom to the living room and an extra desk was installed for us. The closet storage was big enough and there was a separate area for all of our empty luggage. The rooms were quite ample and we were happy.

At Sol de Oro our price included breakfast. Typically we like to have Fitness cereal, skim milk and banana for breakfast. Most hotels have corn flakes or a sweetened cereal so we bring a plastic bag filled with our cereal choices and just use their fruit, milk and coffee for breakfast. We added popped quinoa and kiwicha in Perú to our cereal for a little excitement. The coffee at Sol de Oro (and many other places in Perú) is a thick and strong essence to which hot water is added. If the water is hot enough the coffee can be a pleasant temperature. It’s a unique system. Every day Sol de Oro had delicious freshly made juices and sliced fruit. We started enjoying Peruvian mangos! Our favorite is the Edwar variety.

When paying the bill at Sol de Oro after the first week, we learned that paying in dollars was to our benefit because the exchange rate that the hotel used to convert dollars to Nuevo Sol was so disadvantageous. Interestingly, at the ATMs we could specify that we wanted US dollars and the hotel accepted US dollars. By withdrawing dollars from the Citibank ATM we could avoid all of the exchange rate shenanigans, both with the bank and with the hotel. We ended up paying US$100 a day—full stop. That is the first time in 14 years of traveling outside the States that we paid in US dollars that we had withdrawn from a local ATM outside of the US.

Many travel sites recommend spending only a day in Lima. We think that is bad advice. We had a great time during our month stay in Lima. The downtown historical area is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and well worth a Lima Visions tour. There are great museums and world class restaurants at a fraction of the prices in first world cities. We also did some shopping to replace old clothes at the end of summer sales. At least three days in Lima should be recommended so that a visitor can sample the restaurants and the city at a leisurely pace. We added comments to the Restaurant section of the Living in Peru website, using the nickname “aledm”. We gave a 9/10 rating to:

o Astrid y Gastón (owned by Astrid Gutsche y Gastón Acurio) – 9.5/10 rating, actually
o El Ancla – 8.5 rating, actually
o Fusión (owned by Rafael Piqueras)
o Rafael (owned by Rafael Osterling Letts)
o Rodrigo (owned by Rodrigo Conroy)

We also thought that Huaca Pucllana was a great place for tourists, particularly if there is a dance performance scheduled. It’s a beautiful place, with the ruins lit at night and we had a very good meal there.

The suburb of Miraflores reminds me of Santa Monica, California. There is a high palisade by the ocean (called a malecón) and a park extends for kilometers. Far below is a 4 lane highway (like Highway 1 in California) and then the beach. Unfortunately, at the sand level, there is no continuous sidewalk and the sand is brownish, like mud. In many places there have been put small black pebbles over the sand (we think to stop erosion). The result is unattractive.

On our first Sunday in Lima we took out our bikes and went for a ride along the palisade in a northerly direction. We were delighted and very surprised to find an actual, marked bikepath, next to the sidewalk. There is a photo of us on the bikepath in the first installment of our 2007 Perú Travelogue in the LivinginPeru Newsletter dated 1 August, 2007. We went as far as we could, until we were in an ugly neighborhood around Magdalena del Mar, where the palisade park ended and we would have been forced onto inland streets. Our roundtrip was 21km, which we thought was respectable for our first city outing.

On the way back we saw a packed restaurant, called a cebicheria named Punta Sal on the Malecón Cisneros. It has a fabulous view of the sea and the restaurant turns out to be a Lima institution and it looked like the place to be on a Sunday afternoon. We had several different dishes, including a cebiche that was delicious. We were disappointed to learn that Punta Sal is only open for lunch. We were told that people just don’t eat fish for dinner (a habit formed when there was no refrigeration, we guess) so cebicherias don’t have any incentive to stay open at night. As we stayed in Lima we were “forced” to have a larger lunch than we would habitually have. We wanted to try restaurants that were only open for lunch and they were always packed! Fortunately, Lima also has world class restaurants that are open for dinner.

It’s hard to break old habits and for us dinner is a major part of our evening’s entertainment. In most cities, we completely miss the nightlife available because it doesn’t interest us and because we are in bed by 11p.m, after watching a favorite TV series (that Dimitri has recorded on the VCR that we carry in our 11 pieces of luggage).

We had a nice routine in Lima. Every other day we went to the gym on the roof of Sol de Oro to do some treadmill, step or ski machine workouts and then to do some weight machine exercise. Afterwards, we’d use the sauna, steam and then the rooftop Jacuzzi. Each day the service staff heated the Jacuzzi water to our preferred 39° C temperature. This has become a ritual with us in Perú. The Jacuzzis we’ve experienced are kept too cold for us. Fortunately the hotels have been willing to indulge our Jacuzzi temperature preference.

Every Sunday we would take our bikes out for a 35 km/ 22m roundtrip ride to downtown Lima. There is a real, almost continuous, bike path along Av. Salaverry from the park at the palisade in San Isidro. So we go to the palisade park in Miraflores and ride the bike path north along the coast. Then we take a right up Salaverry and take that bike path as far as it went to downtown Lima. Our destination was always in Barrio Chino/Chinatown for dim sum After trying a few, we have decided the best (where we see the most Asians) is Salón Capón. People have warned us that it is dangerous to ride bicycles in Lima. We’re not sure why because we had no problems the four times we did that ride. There were other people on the bike path and it seemed fine. We park and lock our bikes in a car park near the restaurant.

During our month in Lima we found Polvos Azules and Compuplaza in downtown Lima. We bought stacks of the latest movies for S/.3 each. We bought some software for S/.3 at Compuplaza too. What a bonanza! If our hotel doesn’t have a DVD player we can watch our movies on our computer. No problem.

Before we found Polvos Azules we would record movies off of the cable TV in our hotel rooms. Finding good movies on cable is a very time-consuming task. We have to research the ratings of the films on the IMDB website to see if the rating is over 7/10 (our minimum requirement) and then read the story line in English to make sure it will be interesting. Now that we have a stash of our own movies, can eliminate that daily task. We just record our favorite weekly series shows and watch them at our convenience.

One of our chores in Lima was to get the damage fixed to our car caused by our goat encounter in Argentina. We had stopped at a Subaru dealer in Iquique, Chile and had an estimate but that service center had not inspired confidence. We thought we might wait until our return to Santiago but we stopped by the Lima Subaru dealership on Av. R. de Panama. They gave us an estimate and were very professional and pleasant. They did a beautiful job, finished on time and washed and waxed the car as well. The entire experience was delightful and their service exceeded our expectations. The Argentinean goat caused US$1500 of damage, by the way.

We were told it doesn’t rain, ever, in Lima. One night it did and that must have been the exception that proves the rule. Instead of rain there is a fog that comes off the ocean and humidifies the air. It’s called a garúa, we understand, when it is actually misty. Many days it’s just foggy.

When we weren’t otherwise occupied, we visited museums. Museo Larco in Pueblo Libre is our favorite. Museo de la Nación is worth a visit and a tour (at 3 p.m. in English). We also went to the dentist and did other everyday kinds of things. Miraflores, San Isidro and the surrounding areas are easy places to live (if you can get used to the constant sound of car alarms).

We always took taxis around Lima and most rides were under US$4, even to downtown Lima from Miraflores. Many of the taxis are the little Korean cars like in Arequipa, but there are many more comfortable station wagons too. And the price is the same. Most of the cars are old and rickety but not as bad as in Argentina. There are lots of old 1960’s-style VWs too. We learned from a taxi driver that they were made, until recently, in Mexico and brought into Perú.

The traffic is totally undisciplined and there aren’t enough stop or yield signs, traffic lights or other road signs. The way that speed is controlled is by giba/speed bumps—they are at many intersections—and they are very uncomfortable for the passengers. They do slow down the cars though.

Through our dentist, Dr. Wendy Johnson, we learned that Lima Tours was promoting an Amazon cruise. Dimitri had been doing lots of research and had not found a cruise that was available and was top end (meaning air conditioned cabins). It turned out that the Lima Tours package was available for our dates and we could combine the Delfín cruise up the Amazon from Iquitos with Amazon Horizons and a top end lodge experience at Ceiba Tops, down the Amazon from Iquitos. By the way, there is a photo of the Delfín in the first installment of our 2007 Perú Travelogue in the LivinginPeru Newsletter dated 1 August, 2007. Off we went for 10 days in the Amazon, leaving our car and bikes locked in the guarded garage of the Sol de Oro. And our excess suitcases were kept for us in the storage room.