The dangers of Peru

I was a bit nervous about Peru. The Shining Path terrorist group may be a thing of the past, but the Lonely Planet guidebook still warns that tourists need to be careful of thefts. The "dangers" section mentions kidnappings outside Lima Airport - apparently they bundle you into a car, drive you to a cashpoint machine and empty your bank account.
As backpackers in the 80s and 90s, you protected yourself from robbery by carrying your valuables - money, passport, ticket - in a money belt or neck pouch that went under your clothes. Times have changed. Sad but true, the Mandow Godden luggage contains two laptops, one iPad and three smartphones. (And it's an even sadder fact that they get a significant amount of use.)
But you can't protect two laptops and an iPad in a money belt, and after our experience in Chile, we are a tad paranoid.
Our hostel in Lima had arranged an airport pick up and given us a password. We were under no circumstances to get into a taxi EVEN if the driver was displaying a card with our name on it, unless he/she knew the password. "Contrasena" we whispered conspiratorially. "Sol," he said. It was like being in a spy movie. Then, when we arrived at the heavy-duty security grille that serves as the hostel door, the driver would use his mobile to ring up to reception and someone would come down and let us in. And so it worked - we arrived unscathed.
Ironically, after all that, the hostel was a total dump; the sort of place you might have stayed in at 22, or possibly 32, but not at 52., or even 62. The room smelt of sewage, Sam's bed had long black hairs on the sheet, and the window appeared to open out onto neighbouring rooftops. OK, so you might have needed Spiderman powers to get across to remove our valuables, but as I mentioned, we are paranoid.
We spent the evening huddled over our possessions, leaving the hostel only one at a time to get dinner. I was reminded of a night my mother, brother and I spent in Paris when I was 10. Mum had booked a cheap hotel in the centre, only to discover after we settled in that it was actually a brothel. David and I slept blissfully unaware, but woke to find my mother bleary-eyed, a chest of drawers over the doorway. Now I think about it, there's a touch of sadness in us protecting our devices as mum protected her children...
Anyway, then, as now, we moved to a different, more up-market place the next morning.

Historic Lima centre

Photo note: I realise we didn't take many photos of Lima, and none relevant to this blog, so this is not one of ours. We apologise for any inconvenience. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

Actually, just one final word about Chile...

A postscript to Chile.

Chile sounded exotic to me (it still does), but in many ways it is not so different to New Zealand, or England. The scenery is more dramatic in places, but from a traveller perspective it's not too strange. The train and bus system pretty much works, the police appear efficient and not especially corrupt, there are traffic lights with flashing green men and a diminishing number of post offices. If you are 13 and so inclined, you can nip into KFC for popcorn chicken and fries - once you've mastered "papas fritas", and if you can handle the popcorn chicken being cubed not round. Sandwiches in many forms, mostly containing cheese, seem a staple food.
To make a New Zealand feel at home, there are earthquakes and volcanoes. In fact I heard Chile has 190 volcanoes - around 10% of the world's total. The area around San Pedro de Atacama alone has nine active volcanoes.
There are clean-looking pharmacies on practically every corner and a good medical system. My aunt's friend, who lives in the Falklands, had her cataracts done in a state-of-the-art hospital in Santiago.
So with so much that is the same, it's fun to look for the little things that bring you up short and make you realise you really are abroad. Here are a few we spotted one day when we were thinking about such things:
- jugglers, drummers and other performers working the road crossings between light changes for small change, much as windscreen washers do in Auckland;
- pumpkin sold by the slice in the local shop. Each time a customer wants some pumpkin, the shopkeeper hacks off anothe chunk;
- food trucks being converted VDub combi vans;
- quinoa as a staple, not a trendy menu novelty in over-priced cafes. In San Pedro we had quinoa soup, quinoa omelette, even quinoa as a dessert. The fast food joint at Santiago airport offered a quinoa burger. Now there's an idea for Nadia Lim (warning: New Zealand-only reference).
- putting your toilet paper in a little bin by the side. That's a hard one for a prudish Englishwoman, but better, I suppose, than the alternative.

Then there are the language trip-ups, without which no holiday would be complete. I have to admit, rather shame faced, that my tactic for survival in Spanish-speaking countries, given my very limited knowledge of the language, is to try the appropriate French word with a jaunty Spanish lilt. Much of the time it works. For example (with apologies to native speakers of either language):
Buon journo (bonjour)! 
A que hora parte el autobus? (A quelle heure part l'autobus?)
Que es el dia mejor para ir a la museo? (Quelle est le meilleur jour pour aller a la musee?) etc.
Sometimes it doesn't work though. Wanting to post some stuff back to New Zealand, I asked people in the street for "la poste centrale" (add your own jaunty Spanish "eh"s at the end of each word) and after encouraging indications from several people that I was going in the right direction was a bit surprised to find myself in the admissions area of the Santiago hospital. It might even have been A&E. 
Apparently the word for post office is el correo in Spanish. Not posta.
Posting my letter wasn't that urgent.

Earthquakes

Our hostel in Valparaiso was a beautiful, 110-year-old, two-storey, end-of-terrace house, which had seen better days, with misshapen sash windows, and the odd ominous crack. The establishment was run by an elderly couple, who appeared from the back every time we opened the front door, even though we had our own key. It was going to take armed assailants with machetes to steal our stuff from this place; for which we were most grateful. We were the only guests, so had the biggest, best room - at the front, with wonderful views across the port, where we could watch Chile's navy (or some of it anyway) doing whatever navies do in port.
We had at least four earthquakes the evening/night we were there and although we assured our anxious hosts that being from New Zealand we were unfazed by tremors, they were the biggest shakes we Auckland softies had ever felt.
They obviously weren't the city's first recent shakes, however; walking around the during the day we had seen broken glass on the odd pavement from shattered windows above. But overall the city seemed to have emerged relatively unscathed - a slight surprise considering the precarious way buildings (not all of them in a great state of repair) perch on the side of the precipice-like hills. Our taxi driver to the bus station the following morning assured us that Valparaiso buildings are strong, though residents have been warned to prepare for a big shake coming, he said. It must be a very scary thought for locals, and the selfish part of me was glad to be getting on a plane to Peru.

Valparaiso

Valparaiso is like Wellington crossed with an Umbrian hill town and then multiplied by a factor of 10. Early city fathers built their little port on a site surrounded by 42 steep hills. Now it's a city of 300,000 people who have to live on these hills, with steep cobbled streets and 15 rickety, 19th-century funicular railways taking locals and tourists up slopes too steep for cars.

But it's a wonderful place, full of colonial buildings from an earlier heyday, painted in an infinite variety of bright colours, supplemented by thousands of murals. It seems that anyone with a patch of exterior wall needing renovating gets an artist not a house painter to do the job.
Our time in Valparaiso had been cut short by staying an extra day in Santiago to sort out police reports and the purchase of new computer items (note: shopping malls in Chile are no more enjoyable than those anywhere else in the world). So we had only one day to explore Valparaiso's central suburbs, climb hundreds of stairs, test as many funiculars as we came across, photograph picturesque streets, and eat a large, delicious, cheap "menu del dia" lunch in a cafe overlooking the city. The sun shone and all was extremely right with the world.
We also visited the house of former Nobel prize-winning Chilean poet, writer and diplomat Pablo Neruda. Now a museum, it gives a glimpse of a man as expansive and eccentric as the city he lived in. (Well, he lived there some of the time; he also had homes in Santiago and Isla Negra.) 
Neruda was keen on things nautical and some of his windows were portholes. He was also an avid collector of random stuff that took his fancy, including a large wooden fairground horse, a stuffed flamingo-like bird, which he hung from the ceiling, and Chinese paintings he used as wardrobe doors.

The poet apparently never ate alone, saying that a meal on your own was "like eating in a tomb", so he would gather friends for every lunch and dinner. Fitting two boozy, discursive meals a day around prize-winning poetry and being Chile's representative in Jakarta, Buenos Aires and Paris must of been quite something. Oh and he always had a nap in the afternoon.
Perhaps that was the secret.