The next day we walked to the park and looked at the stupid hand drawn map the last hostel gave us and decided to walk to downtown Lima to check out the cathedrals we heard about. This is the same map that we used when we waked from Barranco to Miraflores and this stupid map made it look as though the distance from the park to downtown Lima was about the same as we walked days before. So, we decided to be smart and save some money by not taking a cab, still not confident with the buses after our last experience.
Mark saw the biggest McDonald's he had ever seen and need to get some. Anna and Mark are not fast food eaters, especially places like McDonald's, so it took a good 15 minutes of convincing to get Anna to agree. Way better burgers here. The meat actually sticks out of the bun and is thick. It looks like the picture.
We then walked and walked, checked our map, and walked way more than we did to get to the park days earlier. The Miraflores District was long gone, cars were less prevalent and bad graffiti was everywhere as an overwhelming sense of ghetto was approaching. Anna bought a Red Bull to keep up the energy (there is no Rockstar anywhere in Peru!) and told Mark to take a picture of her drinking it. Mark didn't like the idea of pulling out a giant Nikon but did it anyway. Right then some guy comes up while Anna is holding her Red Bull and says "you two don't look Peruvian." He was right. He spoke clear English and said he was from New Jersey. We showed him our stupid map and he didn't really say much except we walked really far and he wishes he was as young as us to be able to do that. He showed the map to his lady friend, who barely spoke English but she pointed in the direction we were going and said we have A LOT further to go.
We walked and walked and then crossed a freeway and ended up in a ghettoer area. Anna saw a giant Coca-Cola billboard we passed an hour earlier and realized we were now backtracking. We gave in and got a cab. We ended up driving back the way we walked, got on the freeway we had crossed, then drove another ten minutes to downtown Lima. Would've been a lot of walking without that cab. Stupid map! The cab dropped us off at Plaza de Mayor, which we recognized from all the postcards we had seen. It was swarming with people. Most of them were locals, not too many whites. Anna being white and Mark, getting yet another unhealthy blast of sun during the walk, was shiny red, we stood out like soar thumbs. It wasn't one minute before a group of girls came up to us with video cameras wanting to interview us for their English speaking class. They asked us about ten simple questions any beginning language class would be studying. That was done, we took a picture of the fountain where the interview took place, walked about twenty feet and were asked to do another interview, then another right after in the same spot. We realized that many of the locals were students and were told to find English speaking tourist to record an English spoken interview. If you got stuck in one interview, the pirhannas would attack and you couldn't move. We took off up a side street and found another festival with live music and booths selling Inca merchandise and stuffed llama dolls.
We took picture of the chapels, churches and cathedrals and the statues of the giant white Europeans. We got a deeply disgusted feeling that the Peruvian culture has been mislead to worship this false idol that the Spaniards basically raped and murdered into their livelihood and destroyed all of their original ideals and teachings. You can stand in front of a church and statue made from the rocks of a torn down Incan temples, while a local Peruvian is practically begging you to buy some Incan trinket or a booklet of the lost Incas. Shit's weak! Not trying to walk while it slowly became dark, we took a bus back to our hostel Kokopelli and called it a night.
The next morning was supposed to be our last in Lima. Mark was super excited to get out of the loud, busy, humid, hot city life and looking forward to the 21 hour bus ride to Cusco so he could knock out a chunk of his book about neanderthal tribes battling early homosapiens in the future. We took a cab to the bus station which we walked past the day before. Our bus was supposed to leave at 2:00pm on Monday, but the laborers of Peru decided to start an anti-tax strike at noon Monday. There is only one road to get to Cusco that has to go through Nazca, and that's where they decided to start blocking the road, letting nobody through. With nowhere to go we had to take a cab back to Kokopelli. They only had a four bed dorm available for us so we bunked with two other people. One roommate was from Cusco who was incredibly nice, named Juan Carlos. We went upstairs to the rooftop bar and drank with him. He found out we're from San Francisco and called his one gay friend in Lima to hand out with us. Forgot his name, super nice as well, but he told us that Lima and Peru aren't very open to gays like San Fran is and how he wants to visit California where he won't feel judged or have to act straight around certain people.
Mark must have dranken some Peru water, because he was in the bathroom every hour letting the waterfall noises commence. Anna didn't have that problem. We went to bed and around 3am another hostel guy took Juan Carlos' bottom bunk. In the morning he saw Anna's SF Giants shirt and showed her his on the ground saying "nice shirt." His name was Willy, from Monterey and had been living in Argentina with a girl named Kristy who was in another room. They were stuck at Kokopelli too because of the strike. They spoke Spanish well and took us to breakfast. While eating they told us to be careful of certain things while traveling and to try other things when in certain towns. They were doing all of South America and had a lot of good information to share. We said our goodbyes and took a cab back to the bus station. The strike was still in full force and the bus station was a complete cluster fuck. We stood in line for over an hour to be told that we were not going to Cusco that day. The bus station was about 95 degrees inside with no fans, 100% humidity and Mark's rhea was teetering on the edge of an accident.
We couldn't take another minute of Lima so we dealt with the front desk, where no one spoke English, were able to get a refund of 85% of our bus tickets, and took a cab to the airport to try our luck there. Our cab driver spoke good English and told us it would be S/.40, which Mark said was too much, but he said he had tricks to get us there fast. The freeway and side roads were all stop and go, so he reached back and locked our doors, told us to roll up our windows as he flipped on the AC and his CD of 80's and 90's pop rock hits. He said the road was going to get dangerous. He then turned off the main street and started zig-zagging towards, what seemed like, us getting robbed in some rural slums. We followed a river that was speckled with homeless camps and lots of trash for a good ten minutes before jumping back on to stop and go traffic of the freeway a few blocks from the airport. Had we stayed on the freeway the whole time it would've been an hour or so, this guy got us there in fifteen minutes and we got to see another poverty stricken side of Peru that tourist never get to see.
We got inside and purchased two tickets to Cusco that were not cheap. This whole strike added a huge sum on the total of our trip. The taxis to and from the bus station, another night in Kokopelli, plus drinks there, the 15% the buses kept, the taxi to the airport and the flight tickets too. Not too cool. We had ten minutes to check our bags and board the plane, so we ran through the airport and made it just in time.
Our plane took off and we got to see Lima from above. It was mind blowing to see the areas we had been walking and cabbing with the vast amounts of slums surrounding all of the city. We looked for Pachacamac to no avail. Within ten minutes we were flying over desert and another ten we were floating over the gorgeous Andes. When we flew over the Sierra's back in California, we thought those were huge and vast. They are beautiful in their own right, but not nearly as jagged, as high or as long and picturesque. Our jet weaved in and out of these mountain tips that were fifteen to twenty thousand feet high. Anna isn't the best flyer and when forceful turbulence hit at one point, she grabbed onto Mark with a desperate look on her face. All of a sudden there was a town and we came to a smooth landing in the twelve thousand foot elevation town of Cusco.
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