This year we are escaping the 100 degree plus heat in St. George by traveling to Peru. In past years, when we planned our trips, we booked our own modest lodging and arranged activities and internal transportation on our own—a lot of work! This year we decided to be kind to ourselves and let Rough Guides select accommodations, arrange for all internal transportation and a few tours. As you will note, we ended up staying in hotels much more lavish than we normally book. But oh well, we will “suffer” through it!
6/20 - We arrived in Lima on Roger’s birthday. I don’t think either of us fully appreciated the fact that this is Peru’s winter. We thought Peru was a tropical country, near the equator and would be either rainy or dry, but warm. As a result, we were taken aback when we arrived to cool (60 degree) cloudy and misty weather—there were no blue skies or sunshine in Lima. Now I realize that we shouldn’t complain about being cool as the alternative in St. George is extreme heat. Weather aside, we cleared customs non-stop (that means there was no check of our luggage) and were met by a friendly Mario who would be our guide for our first week in Peru. He and a driver took us to our hotel, the Blu Hotel Boutique (bluhotelboutique.com) a delightfully small hotel in the Miraflores district of Lima. We arrived at 11:30 pm tired from the full day of travel.
6/21 - Our first full day in Lima, we were on our own. We enjoyed a beautiful hotel breakfast served at the cafe adjoining the hotel. The breakfast included fresh juice (papaya, strawberry, etc.), yogurt, granola, eggs and your choice of coffee—cappuccino, Americano, flat white, etc. We selected the “huevos Peruanos,” (scrambled eggs with spicy sausage) and cappuccinos. Delicious!
Then we explored the streets of Miraflores while searching for a bank with an ATM to obtain local currency. Navigating without a map was a challenge as we were told that we could only trust one kind of ATM. But eventually we found the bank. As we walked back to our hotel, we found the “cat” park (AKA Kennedy Park or 7 June Park) and a great little outdoor cafe (El Parquetito) for lunch/dinner. The park is known locally as the cat park because hundreds of cats live there in little cardboard boxes decorated by the locals. The cats are adored here and are very friendly, even wandering through the cafes hoping for a handout. On our walk back to the hotel, we found a large grocery store with a huge produce section and everything else you could possibly need. It would be easy to live in Lima except for the 5 months of mist and the horrible traffic. The good news is the mist is wonderful for our dry St. George skin. We got our 10,000 steps on this first day.
6/22 - After breakfast at the hotel, we had a half-day city tour. It took us an hour to move through traffic to Lima city center. On the trip to the center, we stopped at a huge pre-Inca archeological site. It was constructed of adobe bricks stacked vertically to withstand the area’s frequent earthquakes. In fact, several pre-Inca civilizations left ruins in Peru. We knew nothing about these early people prior to this tour.
We then drove through the San Ysidro residential area of Lima with large colonial mansions (sometimes a full block in size) and interspersed parks of olive trees brought to Peru by the Spaniards. Finally, we arrived at the central plaza (Plaza de Armas) with its cathedral, president’s house, mayor’s house and paved central square. Most of the buildings had been restored since the turbulent 1980s when far left groups stressed by economic conditions tried to overthrow the government and frequent earthquakes. We toured a nearby monastery/church with catacombs and a beautiful wood-lined library with more than 25,000 books, some dating from the 16th century. The library especially brought out the historians (both of us have B.A.s in history) in Roger and me.
After the city tour in the early evening, we walked to Punto Azul for dinner. Had to wait 45 minutes for a table. We were served small (Costco-sample size) Pisco Sours for the inconvenience. It really wasn’t much of an inconvenience as we met a lovely Chilean woman, her husband and daughter who were celebrating her 83rd birthday. She was delighted that Roger nearly shared a birthdate with her. Again, we tried local specialties. Kathy had causa pollo and Roger had tacu tacu. The causa pollo had layered yellow potatoes, chicken salad and avocados. The tacu tacu was a rice-bean-onion mixture with herbs and all kinds of fish (baby octopus, shrimp, mussels) shaped like a football. Are we making you hungry yet?
6/23 - Today we had a long 4-hour drive with Mario (our guide) and Victor (our driver) south to Paracas. We passed landscapes with no vegetation—just sand, dirt and rocks—and a few beach communities. There were some flat areas of irrigated farmland, but not much. We had been advised that western Peru was largely desert, but seeing it was still a surprise. Paracas, our destination, is known for its beaches and the natural reserve, so we had expected the clouds and mist to evaporate. But it remained cool, cloudy and very humid. We stayed at the beautiful Aranwa resort but couldn’t enjoy the cold pool. We did have marshmallows roasted on an open fire that evening, a nice dinner of soup at the restaurant and then retired to our room to read.
6/24 - The following day after breakfast, we drove 2 hours inland towards Ica to a huge 800-acre vineyard with a resort in the middle: Hotel Viño Queirolo. Here we found the sun! We couldn’t check in immediately, so we had a tour of the property’s car museum. The 30 or so cars in the museum dated from a 1905 Ford to two 1960s pickups. All the cars ran and were meticulously maintained—looked as if they had just come off the showroom floor. They called the 1957 Chevy an antique, but we remember it from our teens (hmmm..what does that make us?). The 4th picture below shows a 1904 car with kerosene headlamps. This tour was followed by a tour of the vineyard and the tasting cellar where we tasted 2 wines (Chardonnay and Malbec) and 3 Piscos (wine brandies).
After, we moved into our room, we took a swim in the large heated pool, ate a quesadilla and relaxed until our trip with Mario and Victor to Huacachina Lagoon—an oasis located on the outskirts of Ica in the middle of sand dunes. We strolled around the lagoon (to which the community has added water due to years of drought) and then queued up for a dune buggy ride at sunset. We were joined in the 6-seat dune buggy by two women from Argentina and Uruguay and at the last minute a middle-aged man. We strapped up (I must say the driver was not terribly concerned about the tightness of our seat belts) and took off. What appeared from a distance to be flat desert was really a bumpy, terrifying ride up one side and down the other accompanied by the delighted screams of the girls sitting in the front seats…kind of like a roller coaster. The screams of the girls seemed to encourage the driver to find steeper and faster dunes to conquer. (Am I sounding old????) We stopped (gratefully) for views of the dunes at sunset—absolutely stunning—and for those adventurous enough to snowboard down the dunes…Roger being one of them.
Full of sand and great memories of the ride in the dunes, we returned to the resort for a lovely dinner and a great night’s sleep.
6/25 - Mario and Victor picked us up at 6am the next morning for the ride back to Paracas (still cloudy) and a boat trip to the Ballestas Islands (the poor man’s Galapagos). As we queued up for the boat trip, we met a young couple with their two children from Colorado who were at the end of their stay in Peru. They sat near us on our boat adventure, a 40-minute ride over flat ocean to the islands. On the way to the islands, we saw a Nazca drawing on the sandy hillside—quite astonishing that the lines remain visible after 1000s of years. The islands are fairly barren, but contain beautiful layers of colorful rock, arches, and sea stacks. We saw Humboldt penguins 🐧, cormorants, terns, boobies, pelicans and a few other birds we could not identify. There were lots of sea lions both in the ocean and on the rocks and buoys. The Ballestas Islands do not compare with the pictures we have seen of the Galapagos, but we thought the tour was well worth it. After the tour, we had coffee with Mario and Victor, hopped in the van and headed back to our hotel in Lima.
For us, this was a busy entry week. But now we look forward to two weeks in Arequipa (7,700 ft elevation) with nothing planned.
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