I Flew, I Flew!

At breakfast, we discovered that the “child” that has been making constant annoying screeching noises every morning was actually a parrot named Papi. There was also a giant turtle wandering around outside the hostel restaurant.
Started off the day going to Pachacamac, a set of ruins near Lima. Took a taxi there because the girl at our hostel said the bus took a really long time. Of course, the taxi driver way overcharged us even after bargaining, which we found out from our guide at the ruins after we had already agreed to the price. So it goes being a tourist. We thought that since we were going pretty far away from central Lima, we would get away from the smog, but nope, it was still there as a backing to the ruins. Somehow during the summer, the sun manages to overpower the smog and the sky is blue, but it’s winter now and it’s just grey all day long and then dark grey at night. Yuck.
Our tour guide at the ruins was a really nice 21 year old girl who was interesting to talk to and gave us a pretty good tour of the ruins. She talked about the different cultures that had been there over the times and the different sized adobe bricks they used. In Quechua, Pacha means earth and camac means creator. The site is named after the oracle Pachacamac, who the people believed could see the future. They prayed to his idol, which was made out of wood and had symbols of both a man (serpents) and a woman (corn). In order to make a sacrifice at the main temple there, the Temple of the Sun, people needed to purify themselves for one year – no chili, salt, meat, or sex. It was twenty days of purification for the smaller temple of Pachacamac. We walked up to the top of the temple and actually saw green for the first time in a few days, and had a really good view of the ocean and all around Lima. There were also three pyramids with ramps and storage areas for animals and foods to sacrifice. There was the Acllahuasi, the house of the chosen women, where young women were taught how to care for men and then chosen by the men to be their wives or to be sacrificed to the gods.
We had taken the highway there, but took city roads on the way back and the change between each city was so clear as we drove on. Central Lima is completely dirty and worn down, no high rises, but full of churches and old colonial mansions. The area near Pachacamac was the same. As we entered Barranco, one of the richer areas around Lima, the houses got much nicer and the buildings got taller and shinier. In Miraflores, it practically felt like we were in a city in the US, minus the Spanish. Such a huge difference in two places within 15 minutes of each other. .
We got dropped off by our taxi in Miraflores to go paragliding. We still hadn’t gotten hold of the people by phone so didn’t know if it would work out, but got there to find a bunch of people on the field with their paraglides. Was more expensive than we had thought it would be, but still had to do it. I loved flying, it was such a cool experience. Went over to a lighthouse and back again, really high up over buildings, really low near the ground, over the ocean, around in circles, over a shopping mall. It was only ten minutes long but it was awesome, I loved it. It’s such a cool job to have to take people paragliding all day long, the guy who took me had been doing it for 18 years.
Wandered around Miraflores for a while, looking at the tiled murals in the Parque de Amor. Ended up in this huge high-class shopping mall. Again, felt like America. It was kind of disgusting to see all the ridiculously fancy shops and such a nice mall so close the an area where most people live under the poverty line. We wandered around the mall a bit but I was mostly just annoyed at the concept of it. We ate lunch there, which was much more expensive than the usual – it was just over 3 dollars for a sandwich, which would have in other areas cost about a dollar. Got cheap (compared to the US) mango gelato for dessert, yum. There was a KFC, Chilis, Pizza Hut, Burger King… America taking over the world. I thought, at least there’s no McDonalds or Starbucks, but boom, there were those too. Lovely. Our guide at Pachacamac had told us about a park with fountains that spouted higher than the buildings, so we were considering going there, but asked probably four other people about it and no one gave us much of an answer about whether it was worth going to or not. Since it wasn’t very safe to go there with only two of us, we ended up not going.
Took a taxi instead to Museo de la Nacion in East Lima. Saw Peruvian paintings, ancient ceramics and textiles, photos of the different indigenous cultures. There was one floor about the Inca trail with amusing cartoons of archaeologists all over the wall along with photos of ruins and trails. The top floor was an exhibit about the Peruvian civil war that happened between 1980 and 2000. The captions to the pictures were in Spanish and English, but the main panels were in Spanish and we were rushed so didn’t have time to figure out what they said. So we were completely confused about who was even on which side and what the whole war was about. Have to look that up later.
Now it’s time to go hunt for dinner somewhere near our hostel before it gets too dark. We have to get up really early in the morning to take a 7am bus up to the mountains to Huancayo where we’ll be volunteering. Yay, a seven hour ride where I doubt I’ll be able to sleep. There should be a nice view out of the window, though.