certification

Sunday 10.7.2016

Lima, Lima, Lima… Where to begin.

I’m from a place with nice weather.  I take this weather for granted.  Jacksonville, Florida has wonderful summers, cool enough autumns (without that “color change” that Molly always talks about), winters that require a coat maybe for a week, and dazilingly blossoming springs.  When I go to cold places I find myself appreciating the change, and yes seasons are wonderful things, but warm weather really isn’t that terrible of a thing.  Clear blue skies, killer sunrises, all that jazz.

Lima is built in the middle of a (surprise) valley near the Pacific Ocean.  It was a tiny Incan settlement before the Spanish built up the region with the goal of developing an administrative center not as difficult to reach as Cusco.  Lima is unique for having no visible sky, at all, seemingly ever (taxi drivers say it clears up a little during the summer).  So we saw all of these wonderful pictures of Lima, displaying a colorful array of colonial architecture, exuberant street art, all the things that would make two young gringo travelers excited to visit….

And then we got there, and we realized that we had made a terrible mistake.

Lima is not a colorful city.  It is not a historically proud city.  It is a gray, traffic-clogged, smoke-choked sprawl of 10 million souls.

Lima is cold this time of year and perpetually exists in this state of about-to-rain.  Misty wind rattles your face from sunrise to sunset, stopping at midday to encourage heavy sweating with an insane amount of humidity.  The sky is a single color – gray, maybe light gray – a result of the historic mists of nearby mountains mixing with non-historic smog to form a permanent blanket of depressing weather.

Molly aptly summed up the city when she explained that her long time friend, backpacking in Colombia at the time, regrets choosing Lima over pretty much anywhere else in South America.  I do not believe that judgement is undeserved.

Our introduction to Lima was a gargantuan shopping mall stapled on to a very large but empty bus terminal.  The mall was close by and probably had a Starbucks with WiFi, but we could not have imagined the number of people in that mall, and upon further recollection that may have been the most people I have ever seen in any given place.  The bustle was enormous, with families of ten pushing through crowds with military unit precision and an unbelievable hunger for whatever store was right around the corner.  Molly and I slipped through cracks in these mass migration movements inch by inch, with all of our belongs on our backs, in a city whose reputation for danger was the worst of any that we had visited.

We left the mall as quickly as possible to get to our AirBnB host.  The taxi ride took an hour and a half, but not to the fault of the driver; Lima’s main highways are literal nightmares, with the equivalent of twelve lanes of traffic but no traffic lines.  Drivers honk microseconds before cutting off drivers to signal a lane change (often foregoing turn signals, for some reason) and the resulting chaos is enough to make one sick.

We made it to Barranco, a nice and young neighborhood in the south of the city, and met our host, also named Chris.  Chris lives with his high school best friend Travis, and together the two escaped (their words) South Carolina to “work a lot less and make a lot more.”  We had an exceptional conversation about our shared home, and talking to other people from the South was refreshing because the accents are still alive and well.  They reminded me of home, which is what I needed on my first day in Lima.