Traveling to Lima

I took off from Seattle heading towards Atlanta where I would meet Ben who was flying in from Milwaukee. Two crappy movies later and I was walking to our departure gate for Lima, Peru, and what luck, a bar right next to the gate to grab a beer and wait for Ben. About a half beer later Ben arrived.


After catching up we boarded our flight, we would arrive late that night, well, Ben arrived late that night, I actually arrived the following day, that is if you look at the timestamp on our passports. We cleared immigration and customs and collected our bags. I then went to exchange some money and encountered the first of many clues which lead me to believe that their economy is largely based on counterfeit currency. It’s important that your bills are perfect, even the tiniest tear on a bill and they will refuse it. Luckily I had $200 in crisp clean fifties and more than doubled my money getting back $554 Peruvian Sol(s). When converting currency you should also ask for small bills. I never figured this part out but they hate to make change, so much so, that a few times I was refused service because they could not (or refused) to give me change, even when using Sol(s). With money in our pockets we went and found our driver Pablo, who would be taking us back and forth to the airport in Lima. He was a very friendly guy and a good local resource. We headed to the Miraflores Colon Hotel, about 30 minutes from the airport and fairly close to the ocean. We arrived and checked in, then headed to the bar to see what the local brews were. They offered Cristal and Cusquena, both good but I preferred Cristal. Just my luck, Cristal was somewhat hard to locate while Cusquena was available everywhere. The hotel was nice for the price.


That’s actually the ocean down there, it’s kind of hard to tell because the skies are so grey as well. The ocean had an interesting smell, not quite fishy and not quite garbage but something in the middle, but people were still surfing in it. I’m from Seattle so I’m used to grey skies, however I have never seen something like this, where it is always grey, in fact later we would learn that because of it they actually paint many buildings yellow to brighten up the place.


The city is kind of dirty, but I’ve still seen much worse than this, however it lacked the character the others had. I headed to bed as the next two days would become an almost marathon run to cram everything in with a few very early mornings. I got in to bed and found the mattress very hard, in fact all the places we stayed had hard mattresses which I found quite comfortable.