Piura and Lima, first tastes of Peru

Piura was an interesting place. Very industrial looking buildings, and the craziest traffic ever. We felt afraid during our taxi ride to the hotel. The hotel was pretty dumpy despite the price, and we got some so-so food for dinner at around 10:30 pm. The next morning we had a flight to Lima, in order to skip the northern Peru desert which somehow is also very high risk for malaria and Dengue. Another life-affirming taxi ride took us to the airport just across the river from our hotel. The airport at least was clean and bright, with just 2 gates and 2 flights coming in and turning around for Lima. We somehow had scored business class seats, and we got some decent airplane food and drinks for our short 1.5 hour trip to Lima. The views of the mountains from the plane were very nice.

Lima is a big town. Quito had not quite 2 million people in it, and was the biggest city we visted in Ecuador (though Guayaquil is bigger, we never went). Lima has almost 9 million, and you can tell. The taxis at least were less frightening and we got to our hotel (Hotel Belen) without incident. The hotel was however rather dusty, loud, and of course, under construction. We only lost the water for a few hours. In Lima we did get to eat fairly well, and also have some Pisco sours and Cuzqueña beer. At La Muralla, we got the best pasta we've had in South America: crab ravioli. Pretty good seafood here, though a bit hit or miss in terms of freshness. We also discovered that the food words in Peru can be quite different than they were in Ecuador. We need to find a food dictionary. We ordered something safe, called "taco", and got something totally unexpected. It's apparently sometimes called Taco Taco or Tacu Tacu (we didn't at the time understand why it said taco twice) and it's a rice and bean dish. Quite yummy. We also ordered a noodle dish (noodle at least is still "tallarin") with some sort of animal product on top. The "meat" was oddly squishy and very strongly gamey. We didn't eat much of the meat part, and after looking it up found out it was...cow's lung. That at least explains the squishy. Still, Lima is a good place to eat. [and in the future, we plan to opt for cow stomach before cow lung.]

We moved hotels to Hotel España the next day. It´s a quirky but comfortable place in a beautiful building with lots of art and spiral staircases, and with lots of animals around (parrot, macaw, tortises, peacock, parakeets, cat, dog, and lots of pigeons). The parrot had a small phrasebook, though only "hola" was clear enough for us to catch. The instructions to find our room included the phrase "go past the turtles", which didn´t make sense at the time but turned out to be accurate. We visited Iglesia San Francisco, which has the catacombs that were in use between the 16th and 19th centuries. Very cool church and creepy yet interesting catacombs. (Sorry no pictures allowed.) We also went to the Inquisition museum, which was much less interesting despite Lima being the seat of the Inquisition in the Americas for over 200 years. Also, tours in Spanish are pretty good, we only missed a little bit.

We arranged a several day itinerary through the agent at the hotel. Today we are heading off to visit Paracas (the park near Pisco), Ica, and Nazca and arrive on the 15th in Arequipa. Should be fun.