Lima
Peru is definitely not dark. It's just what Paddington Bear fans thought. We had an early start to the day, flying out of Santiago at
6am and on our arrival in Peru we took a cab straight to our hostel in a
trendy, artsy part of Lima
called Barranco,
right by the beach. We chucked our bags in at the hostel and set off to explore
the neighbourhood. This area is known for its galleries, museums and street
art, and we soon found the street art round the famous Bridge
of Sighs.
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| Barranco |
After lunch we headed down to the MATE
museum which is home to a permanent exhibition by Lima’s own Mario
Testino, the world-renowned photographer who famously did a shoot with
Princess Diana a couple of months before she died. The MATE museum was founded
by Testino in 2012 with the objectives of bringing Peruvian artists and culture
to international attention and to offer contemporary art and photography to Peru.
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| Barranco street art |
The museum nicely massages Testino’s ego and is a slick
spectacle of his best work, including portraits of Kate Moss, David Beckham,
Cara Delevingne, Princess Di, as well as fantastic shots of indigenous people
in traditional clothing.
Three doors down the road was the Museo
Pedro de Osma. This museum displays a huge range of artefacts, including colonial
art dating back to the 16th century, sculptures, other colonial influences
especially religious and architectural exhibits, portraits and furniture,
silverware and southern Andean art, for example Incan. The museum is in the
gorgeous former home of Pedro Osma who was a great art collector.
The building
is art nouveau style from the early 20th century, set in gardens in
bloom containing wrought iron bicycle sculptures, marble statues and shaded
benches.
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| Pedro de Osma museum |
At the MATE museum we were encouraged to buy tickets for MATE
and the Pedro de Osma museum at the same time to get a small discount and we
each paid 24 Soles (around £6) for both museums. Bought separately they would have
cost a total of 30 Soles.
It was Baby D’s birthday and he wanted a Chinese for dinner
so after a couple of Pisco Sours we wandered down to a highly rated restaurant,
Chifa
Chun Yion, nearby. Lucky we got there when we did (just before opening
time) as there was a queue almost round the corner to get in. Turns out that
one of the most popular types of food in Peru is Chifa
which is a fusion of Peruvian and Chinese, and there are Chinese and Chifa
restaurants all over the place. Also found everywhere, were the menus of the
day which would usually include a soup, a large plate of pasta/rice/chips or a
combination, served with meat or fish, and a glass of chicha
morada, a purple non-alcoholic beverage made with black corn.
Back at the hotel and we had noticed a terrace outside our
bedroom where other guests hung out. We weren’t too worried about being kept
awake though, as a sign on the door said it closed at 11pm. At midnight, Baby D
went out to ask them to turn the music down. At 1am he went out again. At
2.30am we both went out (in our pants).
Now we hate to poop a party (well Baby D does anyway. I love
it), but we had got up at 3am that morning to fly to Lima so we were wrecked
and the music was ridiculous. I think at one point they actually turned it up
after we’d asked them to turn it down. The next day we complained to the staff
and when we finally got hold of the owner after having an argument with the
staff, who thought the party outside our room was acceptable, he initially
refused to give us our money back.
When another guest called him to complain about the noise he
came to the hostel and one of the staff started screaming at him, saying it was
a birthday party and they had done nothing wrong. The tiny Peruvian owner
ROARED back at her telling her to shut up and if not, to pack her stuff and go.
She sat there crying, giving us killer looks, while we stood there gobsmacked.
He gave us a refund and we quickly left. It was difficult to know who were
staff and who were guests at that place, no one seemed to do any work, everyone
just sat around chatting and smoking weed.
Some travellers we’ve met are the most vacuous, obnoxious
twats in the world. Just because someone thinks they’re an individual because
they have dreadlocks, wear tie-dyed baggy trousers and smoke weed, it doesn’t
make them a worldly person. Especially when they’ve travelled to the other side
of the world to sit around in a hostel talking at other people who look exactly
the same as them about themselves, who sit there talking back about themselves,
without actually listening to each other and never actually venturing outside
to see the country they’ve travelled to. Go YOLO somewhere else.
We found another hostel right across town in the historical
downtown area, near the Plaza
de Armas and after checking in we went straight out to explore. First stop
was the Basilica
Cathedral of St John the Apostle and Evangelist Lima, home to the cathedral
museum. This was 10 Soles entry each, which is about £2.50.
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| Government Palace |
The cathedral is the 3rd church built in Lima on
same site; the first having been built in 1540 and most recent completed in
1622. The current cathedral has a variety of architectural styles including
gothic, Elizabethan, renaissance, baroque, neoclassical and neo-colonial.
Inside the cathedral are a number of small chapels or niches dedicated to
various saints including St John the Baptist. The museum also includes numerous
religious sculptures, paintings and ornaments but the most interesting part is
the catacombs containing 70 bodies which was discovered in 2011, and believed
to have been used in the 17th to 19th centuries, when it
was common to have a cemetery under the cathedral.
On our way to the San
Francisco Monastery we discovered the Pisco
and Chocolate Museum which is basically a shop but with plenty of free
tastings - hurrah!
The San Francisco Monastery was also 10 Soles each to get in
and included a tour in English, but we were not allowed to take photos. During
the tour we learned about the architecture of the building including the tiles
from the 17th century and the Moorish ceiling design, structure and
materials, much of which has been restored using same materials where
possible.
Above the 17th century tiles were mounted
paintings but underneath them, frescos were discovered which are in the process
of being restored. The original floor in much of the building was covered in
wax to preserve it. There were cedarwood figures of saints and martyrs, some of
which were carved to depict how they died; for example, one is surrounded by
flames, another is holding a poisoned chalice. There is a famous underground
catacomb containing 70,000 bodies which was a cemetery with entrances leading directly
to and from the chapels, where funeral ceremonies would be carried out. This
was a bit creepy as thousands of bones and skulls are still down there.
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| San Francisco Monastery |
We hung around after the tour to check out the small artisanal
market in the square outside of the monastery, before the main chapel opened for
visitors at 4.15pm. We were allowed to take photos once inside, even though we
hadn’t been allowed to do so on the tour.
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| Bones |
After we had finished at the Monastery, we took a cab across
town to the Museo
de Arte de Lima, or MALI, which cost 30 Soles each to get in. The museum is
closed on Mondays but open until 7pm most other nights, so we had a bit of time.
This museum exhibits over 17,000 pieces of art and 3000 years of art history in
Peru, and the collections are comprised of textiles, furniture, pottery,
paintings, and photography. The art spans from pre-Columbian to colonial, to
republican to modern day. The actual building was built in 1872 and was built
primarily for large scale exhibitions. There was a temporary exhibition of
artist, Eielson
whose art is a more modern take on ancient Peruvians’ quipus;
material that was knotted along a length of cord and used as a system for
accounting. The Incas,
which was the largest ever civilisation in the Americas before being wiped out
by the Spanish in the 16th century, actually used the decimal
system; placement of knots represented anything from single units to tens of
thousands of units.
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| Quipu |
Now I know you’re wondering what on earth has happened to
us, but worry not, the next day we headed down to the Plaza de Armas for…the free walking tour!
11.30am daily at the fountain, the tour was around the historical centre and
took us within 1km of the Plaza de Armas, to the Inca rock Wank’a which the
(alleged) 8% of Peruvians that still follow the Inca religion touch for an
energy boost. We walked on to the Santo
Domingo Church, which is the oldest religious site in Lima and one of the
oldest in Peru, founded in 1535, where local people worship San
Martin, their religious saviour and whose skull is on display, and then on to
the San Francisco Monastery which we’d visited the day before. Our guide told
us that Lima was the colonial capital of South America, was the 3rd
biggest city on the continent and had a population of around 11m.
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| San Francisco Monastery |
We learned of the corruption within government and that a
couple of Presidents were now in prison – the latest being just this year – for
crimes such as money laundering, human rights violations and illegally selling
off land to neighbouring countries. Peru was once much, much larger than it is today,
ranging all the way up to Panama, including some of Bolivia, Brazil and down to
parts of Chile and Argentina. Another President – the only President of Peru to be descended
from indigenous people – is on the run, accused of accepting bribes.
We were staying right opposite Chinatown
so that evening we again sampled the Chifa, Peru’s take on Chinese food, and
again it was pretty darn good actually. The other new delight we tried was Inca
Kola. Bright yellow fizz, which tasted like a cross between Irn Bru and
cream soda. A million additives but delicious. Unfortunately we never made it
the Witches
Market (Mercado de Brujas)which is hidden under the Gamarra metro and sells all
sorts of potions for all sorts of ailments using natural ingredients such as
frogs and llama fetus.
On our last day in Lima we were up early to visit the Larco
Museum before our afternoon flight to Cusco. The Larco Museum highlights pre-Columbian
Andean cultures from over 5000 years ago. It is well worth a visit even though
it’s not that central; the flower gardens alone are worth the trip.
The museum was founded in 1926 by Rafael Larco Hoyle who had accumulated more than 45,000 artefacts. He soon realised that he didn’t have the information to attribute to each piece so he started his own archaeological research and began excavating on the coasts of Peru where he made important discoveries about a number of cultures including Moche. In fact he is lauded as being the archaeologist to have discovered the most about the Moche culture.
The museum was founded in 1926 by Rafael Larco Hoyle who had accumulated more than 45,000 artefacts. He soon realised that he didn’t have the information to attribute to each piece so he started his own archaeological research and began excavating on the coasts of Peru where he made important discoveries about a number of cultures including Moche. In fact he is lauded as being the archaeologist to have discovered the most about the Moche culture.
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| Larco Museum |
The Moche was an agricultural society, which worshipped
nature – similar to all other pre-Columbian Andean cultures. Also similar to
other cultures of this region, ritual combat and the human sacrifice of the
loser were commonplace.
In many Peruvian cultures including the Moche and the Incan,
people believed in 3 worlds; the underworld, where the dead reside, the earth
and the sky. The symbol of the underworld is the serpent for its intelligence,
the Earth is represented by felines, usually the puma or jaguar for strength
and the sky is represented by a bird, which is usually the condor. The bird is
the link between the Gods in heaven and people on the Earth. Interestingly,
Machu Picchu is in the shape of a condor and Cusco is in the shape of a puma.
In ancient Peru skull
deformation was practised where skulls were strapped at a young age when it
was still soft to give it a particular shape which would identify a person’s
social status.
The Larco museum is notable for its room dedicated to
erotica. The Andean people were not all nymphos (as far as we know), but sexual
activity was associated with fertility rites, sacrificial ceremonies and
ancestor worship. The beings that reside in the different worlds are often
depicted through pots and other ornaments as engaging in sexual activity, for
example, humans would have sex with the dead or even animals.
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| Erotica |
We really enjoyed this museum and we spent a good few hours
there, forcing us to rush back to the hostel to pick our luggage up, before
heading off to the airport, destination Cusco.
#peru #lima #sanfranciscomonastery #barranco #mali #testino #pedrodeosma #larcomuseum
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