via Frankfurt to Lima - and home

I go to Frankfurt from here. There’s a mandatory stop for at least 24 hours there (this is in the fine print of a “Round-the-World”-ticket), so I visit my sister who lives there, and my parents visit while I’m at it. It seems I’m the first person on whose arm my niece is willing to spend some time away from the immediate vicinity of her parents. I am unaccountably pleased by this.

Then it’s off to Lima, via Caracas. Caracas has a very, very small airport. And the rolling staircase which is supposed to allow us to disembark is broken and so we wait in the airplane while it’s being repaired. This has me slightly anxious, because the flight left Frankfurt an hour late and I’m worried about my connection. But they have it repaired in a few minutes and I find thereafter that what little infrastructure they have here is entirely appropriate for the traffic they have. They can’t issue e-tickets, but I get my transfer ticket, and pass through security in the transit area, within ten minutes. And shortly thereafter, I’m off to Lima.

I arrive a day earlier than necessary, but the home office has sent enough work my way that I spend most of that day in the hotel room, working. I take a brief walk through Lima searching for a guide-recommended spot for lunch, which I don’t find. I choose a random hole-in-the-wall for lunch, which is decent, and dirt cheap. Everybody speaks Spanish here, and I feel somewhat out of my depth. After French, Spanish is definitely next on my agenda (French lessons at the World Bank start next week).

It turns out that the delegation we were supposed to meet here the next day isn’t available, so the only things being handled are the run-of-the-mill working group issues that my colleague who routinely handles GAFISUD is comfortable handling on his own (and to which I honestly cannot bring any added value by sitting in on the meetings).

So I have another day! Technically, it was two days to myself. Everybody who’s been to Peru from our office indicated that I absolutely have to see Cusco (and, by extension, Machu Picchu). But the flight is 400 USD, by the time I’ve added all the other expenses involved in getting from Cusco airport to Machu Picchu and spending a night there I arrive at a figure of around 800 USD to what would be something like a few hours there at best, with enormous attendant hassle. So – thanks, but no thanks.

But I do find (thanks, Lonely Planet) a guided mountain bike tour to Pachacamac. Which is awesome.

First, though, I’m invited to go to dinner with an international mix of other attendees to the plenary, with people from Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, Argentina and Costa Rica present. Dinner comes with a Pisco Sour, which is the signature drink of Peru (I had my first Singapore Sling two days earlier, in the aircraft about to leave Singapore). I’d describe a Pisco Sour as “Caipirinha meets Tequila”. Not bad. Been there, done that. It’s an enjoyable evening, though some participants appear to have been pregaming, which makes one of the conversations a bit strained.

We relocate, after dinner, to another place for drinks. The pregamers leave us to our postgaming. A Brujer Sour (“Brujer” means Sorceror) is made with coca leaves, and I am told that if I were to take a drug test tomorrow, there’s a risk of failing it. I am not introduced to all of the drinks I am presented with, but decide that I have had a sufficient amount, when a few hours and one establishment later I am drenched in sweat from quite a bit of dancing and find that it’s four in the morning. The (diminished, but still active) group appears to be inordinately impressed by my self-restraint as I head back for the hotel (and, I’m told, continued until the place closed around dawn).

I drink a bottle of water and set my alarm clock for three hours later, telling myself that this is the burden I bear in order to network, which is after all one of the reasons for me being here… ;)

Pachacamac is a town just outside of Lima, and part of greater Lima. The drive there (in a jeep, with the bikes in the back) drives home what I read in the guide: Lima sits in a desert. You don’t notice it in central Lima – they seem to have enough water, what with three rivers meeting the coast there. But all the green you see in Lima is the product of artificial irrigations. All, and I mean literally all, the trees, flowers, lawns etc. are regularly sprinkled with water – else they wouldn’t be there. In Lima proper you see buildings, blacktop or planted greenery. The moment you’re outside of Lima proper, you get to see open ground – which is a light grey, silt-like substance. Nothing grows there. The poor shantytowns (some with access to drinking water and sewage, some, further out, without) look like favelas built on the moon.

Our trip begins on relatively level ground. I’m grateful for that, as my legs shake and my knees hurt (ever so slightly)*before* I get on the bicycle. I munch on local – well, munchies – and continue to drink a lot of water as we make our way through plantations and a bit of jungle-like wild growth close to Rio Lurin (which is otherwise nearly invisible, this being the dry season). We pedal across rough gravel roads and singletrails, with the occasional branch bouncing off our helmets, until we come to a pre-Inca ruin.
Pre-Inca, to me, sounds like “pre-ancient”. But, pretty much all the ruins here are pre-Inca. I thought I knew that the Spanish had conquered an ancient civilization here, and had thought that this had been the Incas. I am told that yes, there had been a civilization here for a thousand years or so before the Spanish came, but it had consisted of a smattering of rival city states. The Incas had been only one of these, and limited to Cusco (Machu Picchu) and its (inland) environment for most of this time. They had conquered much of current day Peru (including Lima) only about 60 or 70 years before the arrival of the Spanish. So they’d thought they were top dog for a relatively short time, before the Spanish came and allied with their former subjects to overthrow them (and then turned around to enslave their erstwhile allies).

From here, the trip takes us up into the foothills. I’m sweating out some of yesterday evening’s (or rather, this morning’s) effects as we go, and a good thing it is, too – my ability to handle what’s coming seems to increase in step with the demands of the tour.
The hills are almost scary, forbidding landscapes reminiscent of moon or Mars. They are light grey, or dark grey - the darker grey is a dried moss, which turns green once it gets moist.
This is how most of it looked:
Dry on the left, and a few seconds after having been “watered” ;) on the right.

The hills above Pachacamac have an eerie quality to them, like bicycling on the moon or Mars.

The pattern is that during summer, the clouds are high and sail over these hills, to rain down in the Andes proper, further inland. In winter, they come in low and the moisture clinging to the hills makes the hills erupt in greens. At the same time, a lot of wildlife migrates from the now drying Andes into the foothills, which teem with life for a while until the next summer. It is July, and winter is just beginning here. Some of the higher, sea-facing hills are beginning to green, and we see the tents of the first nomadic herders higher up in the hills.
We also catch some of the first blooms of “Amancae”, which is the signature flower of Lima – it is endemic to the Andean foothills around Lima, and grows only during winter.
(see picture at right)

One part of the trail we follow has been “improved” – it’s pretty even, and otherwise pretty as well – too bad I can’t look at the stunning scenery much, but they did add rails or anything of the sort to the half-meter-wide trail, and it’s a steep drop to one side. They did add trash cans every 200 meters or so. We see some of the people charged with cementing these things into place. The trash cans themselves were shrink-wrapped for transport. The workers set them up inside their wrap, then tear the cover off their opening – and drop it on the ground.
Sigh.

We have a very local (and somewhat late) lunch out in Pachacamac, then head back into town. I’m roped into a football game between a number of the attendees here, organized by the secretariat in a local football (& cricket !?!) club. Our side loses 6:1 (or maybe 7:1), a result I find particularly displeasing as I was our goalie (couldn’t run much after my day). I’m happy everybody seems to agree the other team had a lot more shots on goal, too – so my quota of saves doesn’t seem to have been any worse than the other side’s. And my colleague from the “Banco Mundial” scores our side’s only goal, so at least the World Bank’s participation in this event wasn’t a total washout.

I’m dead tired after this – so much so, that after my shower I go straight to bed, even skipping dinner. The next day is remarkably uneventful for being the main reason for my coming. We present the Brazil report, have a productive side meeting, go to a reception (to which I bring my suitcase, leaving from there to the airport). There’s a lot of cabs coming by, few of them empty. Of those, the first five (!) refuse to go to the airport.

The driver who does agree to take me there explains that you need an official badge with a picture around your neck to be allowed to take passengers to the airport, and that those are hard to get. When I remark “ah, and you’ve managed to get one of those” (which seems counter-intuitive, he looks a bit dodgy in his hand-welded security cage), he indicates that no, he’ll drop me off very nearby and I’ll have to walk the rest.

Which is only a hundred meters or so. BUT it requires getting out of the car in a somewhat tricky spot, and in a bit of a hurry. And after he’s gone, I realize my cell phone is still in the taxi. Sigh.

Check-in and security take a little over an hour (for me, armed with a Star Alliance Gold Card for “Elite Access” and a UN passport) – it must take ages for everyone else. The lounge is hard to find, and internet access is ridiculously slow. Getting useful contact information from the t-mobile home page seems to have been made intentionally difficult to boot, and my first attempts to call someone (via Skype) are defeated by the poor connection. In the end, I manage to have my number suspended about five minutes before boarding. Phew.

I’m on my way home. Via the “George Bush Intercontinental Airport” in Houston, Texas, which comes across about as sympathetic as the name suggests (to me). I’d asked not to be woken for breakfast, given that the Continental flight had full-flat seats and this might allow me nearly six hours of sleep (it did - yay!). I thought I could eat a little breakfast in the lounge while checking my email. It turns out they don’t have a lounge in Houston, so I pay for breakfast at McDonald’s. And the only WiFi option they have requires downloading an executable file (on top of the charge). And my work laptop won’t even allow that.

Sigh.Can’t wait to get home. Just a couple of hours now…