Arrival at Lima.....
The flight from
Philadelphia to Miami was ok. They served sodas and fruit juice for free
and junk-food snacks if you wanted to pay US $3.50 for them. It was a
twenty minute walk through Miami airport to the international gate A-10
for the flight to Lima, Peru. The boarding procedure was definitely third world. They tried to board people in numbered groups; but nobody seemed
to understand the concept. The ticket takers were continuously telling
people to go back and calling those with the proper group number who had
to elbow their way through the masses. The instructions were repeated
again and again in Spanish, but, were only given once in English. The
public address system garbled every word. I couldn't understand either
language.
I think the seats on the American Airlines A-300 were made
for tiny Southeast Asian people. I was impossible to sit in a comfortable
position. The flight departed about an hour and a half late. At 2:00 A.M.
they served dinner: your choice of chicken of beef. They also had bottles
of wine and other drinks. There were few takers; but, I was amazed at one
couple who ordered and ate everything in sight. Well, it was "free".
The arrival into Lima was much better than I expected. I
changed money at the official rate without a commission at the airport.
I didn't have to fight my way through
the swarm of free-lance taxi drivers
and crooks because the driver from the Hotel Espana - a Hostel with single
rooms with a shared bath at $9.00 per night, was standing in the reception
area with a sign with my name and the hotel's name on it just as
predicted. The charge for the taxi to the hotel was US $9.00. I gave him
$10.00 worth of Soles and he
seemed very happy with that.
It's not warm in Lima. Some unique weather pattern brings
cold water to Peru's shores in the winter and it keeps Lima overcast,
drizzly, and cold. I've been wearing long pants, a woolen undershirt, a
long sleeve button down shirt, and my winter gore-tex shell over that.
I arrived at 4:20 A.M. - the time here is one hour later than
Eastern Daylight Savings Time - and slept for a couple of hours in the
morning. Have since visited the Basilica of San Francisco and the
Cathedral. They both have museums attached. These buildings were built
around 1670 and are world class in architecture and
artifacts. One of the
most impressive things that they have are ancient choir books, hand
written with large letters and short staffs of music. It was one way to
have everybody on the same page of music before mimeograph, view graphs or
Karaoke screens.
I encountered a c
on man who ¨wanted to practice his
English¨. We visited the second oldest church in Peru, where I took the
opportunity to attend a 5 o'clock high mass that just started. It was
well done with lots of singing by a talented old priest and a choir. The
con man, Pablo, sat with me all the way through the mass. Later I let him
earn a secret "commission" on a dinner of ceviche (which included raw,
cooked and pickled fish with lots of lemon juice and cilantro) and a
couple of beers. It's fun being conned when
you're aware and in control.
The
Earth Shook.....
I was in the Internet
Cafe when the earthquake occurred, busily writing requests to
Judi to do some things that I forgot to do before I left and trying to
follow up on the stock market events of the past few days that were as
earth-shaking as the quake. I had just returned to Nazca from a flight
over the Nazca
Lines in a small plane with a Belgian/German couple that I
met traveling to Nacza from Lima. The pilot would point out each feature
by going around it in a tight circle and telling us to watch directly
under the wing tip. First we would go in a right turn with the right wing
tip down and then we would turn left with the left wing tip down so that
people on the other side of the plane could see it equally well. We did
this around a dozen major features and saw a lot more. When we returned
to the airport everyone was feeling a bit dizzy and queasy. An added
complication was that I am taking Doxycyclene to cure Lime Disease that I
came down with on the way back from PEI. That and the Lyme Disease make
me a bit me sick to my stomach and unsteady on my feet. So, it
didn't
bother me a bit when the earth moved I thought I was just having some kind
of jet-lag type of reaction to the flight and Doxy. Then the lights went
out.
People started screaming and running out of the internet cafe.
Bewildered,
I wondered why anyone would get so excited about the power going out.
Then
I thought that the people were taking advantage of a situation to skip out
of the internet cafe without paying. In the light of the cars passing by,
I
noticed that even the lady that operated the place had left. Then, I saw
signs swinging from the ceiling, saw the cubicle-type walls waving, and
felt
my chair trying to wiggle me off of it. ¨Uh-oh, that's not me. This
place
is shaking!¨, I ran out the door into the street with the words to an old
rock and roll song running through my brain ¨I feel the earth move under
my
feet. I feel the sky tumbling down, tumbling down.¨ (I know
that's
not
how to spell tumbling, but that's how they sang it.)
People were shrieking and crying in fear. Some were praying with their
hands clasped together in front of their faces. The earth trembled again
several times for as much as thirty seconds at a time. I kept an eye on
the
telephone poles, which I felt were the only things that could fall on me. My mind flashed back to films of a street in Alaska that opened up in an
earthquake and swallowed cars. I thought, ¨I'm not going to worry about
that. If it does swallow me up, then it's just my time and I'll have to
suck it up.¨ I think that's a western way of saying inshAllah. In time,
the
tremors seemed to have stopped. Businesses closed and locked their
doors. I hadn't eaten, so when I saw a street vendor with a candle selling
peanuts
I bought a bag at five times the normal price.
I walked down the road and saw a restaurant that specializes in Pollo a
Brasa: Chicken barbecued on a fire of charcoal made from local trees in
the
area. The charcoal was still burning strongly. I asked the owner if they
would serve me some chicken. He looked at the waitresses, they looked at
him, they shrugged as if to say "Why not?¨ I sat and ate chicken and
drank
a beer. Other people saw me doing it and decided to do the same. In
about
15 minutes the place was full of people eating at the only place in town
that could cook without electricity.
Thursday, nothing was moving on the Pan American highway. There was no
electricity or city water. There are some thousand-year-old
aqueducts
around Nazca that still manage a lot of water for irrigation. My hotel
owner got buckets of water for the toilets; but, showers or baths were out
of the question. I arranged to see mummies and skeletons in a 1500 year
old cemetery. Then, I went to see some Nazca Lines close up, view the
aqueducts and some Inca ruins. There were a few aftershocks during the
day, and some serious ones exactly 24 hours after the first. It was a
good
day. There wasn't much serious damage in Nazca because 80 percent of the
town was destroyed in an earthquake in 1996 and when they rebuilt it, they
did
it to earthquake-proof standards.
I was determined to go to Lima on Friday. I got up early and walked to
the
center. I talked to as many people as I could in my ridiculous Spanish
and
got as many opinions as the number of people that I talked to. There was
really no communication in or out of Nazca or any of the seriously
affected
areas. I was negotiating with a minibus driver to go to Ica and then
probably walk across the dry riverbed and hitch a ride with someone else
on
the other side, when I heard that a bus driver was preparing to leave for
Lima. I scurried over to the bus, begged to get on board, and was
accepted
without paying any bribes. There was a risk that we wouldn't be able to
go
the whole way. There were other risks that we didn't know about yet, but
a
bunch of stranded French, British, and German tourists and I were willing
to
do it.
Destruction was apparent almost immediately. Boundary walls were broken
or
fallen down on their sides for hundreds of feet. Many houses were missing
one corner. The second floors of lots of houses fell down, likely because
they were not built as strong as the first floor, which was intended to
support was constructed to support two levels. Whole houses were reduced
to
piles of rubble. Billboards were twisted and toppled. Sections of road
split down the middle with one side up to 10 to 12 feet higher than the
other side. Landslides covered the highway. There were sections in the
mountain where the outside lane of the highway slid down the mountain side
and disappeared. Most of the rivers here are dry in the winter. Still,
the
road was damaged at every river crossing. In some places the road
disappeared completely and pay loaders and bulldozers did temporary quick
repairs by piling and packing down dirt to create a new road. These scenes
were repeated again and again for four hours of travel and ended about 150
miles south of Lima.
It was a risk, and it was dangerous. I was continually amazed at how the
bus driver kept going with only a few inches from the edge of the damaged
pavement and nothing but air below. I kept tightening my seat belt with
the
hope that I would survive if the bus tumbled down the mountainside. Of
course, I'm writing this, so you know that we made it. The death count is
now over 500 and thousands are injured. The few cemeteries that we passed
were full of cars for multiple burials already in progress.
It's a tragedy of major proportions. Several of the deaths could have
been
prevented. I did not see any damage to any of the modern industrial
business buildings that were constructed with bricks and mortar and
reinforced concrete pillars. Most of the damage was done to older
buildings
and walls that were constructed of sun-dried clay blocks that are bonded
by
mud rather than mortar. West of the Andes Peru is a desert. It almost
never rains. That type of construction is excellent for most purposes. But, it has no resistance to earthquakes.
There is a mob of people tonight in the city square in front of the
government administration building. Mobile hospitals are being outfitted
to go to the affected area. Trucks are coming in from all over Lima with
donations of food, water, toilet paper and all kinds of items. They are
being unloaded from small trucks and loaded onto larger ones that can
negotiate the broken roads. There are hundreds of policemen with machine
guns and riot gear to prevent the poor of Lima from stealing the donated
goods. A few minutes ago my work station wobbled left and right. I
wondered is it an aftershock, or is it me? Some people ran out the door. It was an aftershock. But, it stopped quickly and, now
it's calm in
Lima. I wonder what more may have happened in the south.
Go To Part 2
[Home] [Up] [Gaston Guay] [Armel Guay] [Leonard Babin] [In Search Of...] [In Peru]
A Trip
to Peru......
August
2007 
