| Jeff Poulter & Graham Tillotson: 17th September 2004 |
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Chimbote to Miraflores, Lima (440km)
Sea mist (Neblina) all day thus cold, very cold.
Chimbote's a bit of a dump but a big one. It took a bit of leaving. At one stage we ended up in a 'burb called Neuva Chimbote and that was an eye opener: poor, poor, poor.
This was always going to be an ear plugs day. Heads down and make miles across the desert. Such days in northern Mexico were deeply boring, hot and uncomfortable. But this trip wasn't like that. Obviously the temperature was kinder but also the desert maintained my interest for most of the day. It's strange (to me, at least) to imagine a desert, dry as dust, reaching down to the ocean. But soon we were riding along a few hundred meters from the Pacific with, what we could see of it through the mist, large breakers crashing the shore.
Although there was no sun to accentuate them, the desert has its colours. Ignoring whatever plants and lichens there may be, the base rock changes from black to brown to ginger, often tinged by minerals. The sand is mostly, well, sandy coloured but there was often an overlay of light grey ashy-coloured dust.
Desert Shapes & Colours
Then there are the shapes of the desert. We were riding alongside, and sometimes through, quite high barren hills on either side of us. The strong on-shore wind here also forms some quite lovely crescent-shaped sand dunes which looked as if they had been sculpted and smoothed by an artist. Typically these dunes would be fifty feet long and twenty or thirty feet high. Some were pure sand, others were sprinkled with grey dust like chocolate on top of a cappuccino. This grey dust is wind-blown across the desert to form elaborate striations and patterns over miles of flat sand.
Colours and shapes combine where the light sand has been blown into the crevices and fissures of the huge igneous rock formations, looking all the world like snow lodged in there. Sometimes the sand would ripple up the windward side of a mountain to look like huge folds of skin.
Honest Cops !!!
We were just ripe for a shake-down. There we were lost in this wondrous world when we passed a police 4x4 at the side of the road, as we had a dozen times today. This time he whoop-whooped his siren and flashed his lights so we stopped. In slow-time he explained that we were speeding. We may well have been but only by five or ten kilometres and, anyway, the 45 kph (in the middle of a desert!) limit was an advisory not a mandatory limit because of the bend on which the copper was parked. We didn't know the Spanish for either mandatory or advisory so we played dumb. The copper persevered. This is a hundred sols fine, chaps. Speeding is serious and dangerous. Que? Que? Hundred sovs, guv. Ah, I say, you give us a ticket and we pay at a bank, verdad? Well, no. 'Cos I'm a really nice guy, you don't have to do that. Why not just give me the hundred and we'll call it quits? Great, says I, can I take a picture while Graham gives you the money? Production of the camera instigated immediate reduction in fine. Bloody laughable. We paid him 10 sols each (about a quid and a half) although we could have bored him out if we wanted to. That was our first shake down in Latin America. About the same as Italy, then.
Arriving in Lima
As we arrived in Lima we saw what must have been the worst of this place. Fifteen miles of desolate, dirty, dusty urban sprawl. Quite horrid. And we encountered by far the worst driving on the trip so far; worse, even, than California. This times it wasn't indifference or inability; this time it was hard aggression and lots of it. I felt quite at home kicking the doors and banging the roofs of a few 4x4's.
Lima's big. Blimey we had been travelling through it for seeming hours before we reached our destination of Miraflores. This is the genteel part of town where the ex-pats live. You can tell: it has street signs, trees, restaurants and, most prized of all, coffee. We found our target accommodation, the Friend's House, after the usual losing struggle with Latin American one-way streets. Eventually we became foreigners and smiled sweetly at on-coming traffic when we rode the wrong way up one-way streets. Normal, normal.
We caught a bus into the old part of Lima. Once we'd found out where they went it was straightforward. Just stand by the side of the street and, when a bus comes along, he'll flash headlights at you. If you respond he'll stop. There are myriads of buses here, each apparently privately owned and touting for business like taxi drivers, often employing the same techniques.
Honk your horn for attention
An empty cab will honk his horn/car alarm at you. If you ignore the invitation, he'll honk again...and again. Ritual ignoring sends them into paroxysms of horn blowing. When four cabs are vying for your attention, it gets frenetic. And loud.
Add a few buses using the same technique and it's sorta lively on the pavement. Private buses are also highly competitive. Each one has a barker who rides shotgun on the front platform, yelling his wares to passing pedestrians like an auctioneer at a cattle market. Buses constantly cut each other up and pinch each other's fares; on leaving a bus stop, they will race each other away, swinging out to pass without a backward glance. Buses will often be hammering along a road three abreast when the outside one will spot a likely fare and swerve across two lanes with screeching brakes. One doesn't get bored on buses.
Festival of Colour
As we arrived at Lima's old town we heard a brass band playing so we set off to investigate. We came across one of the most extravagant parades I have ever seen. Peoples from Puno (Punoese?) who live in Lima were holding an annual festival, probably religious. It was their big one of the year. Hundreds of people were taking part, either playing instruments or dancing. The format was several differently-costumed groups of a dozen or so dancers would precede a brass and percussion band. The rhythm was compelling and the dancing was spellbinding. Each group danced a series of forward and backward steps with plenty of twirls, blowing of whistles and swinging of rattles (the type that football fans used in the fifties). These rattles were elaborate constructions in their own right, shaped like boats and some like 4x4s. But the costumes! A dazzling display of feathers, sequins, embroidery, bells, and bright, bright colours. Many of the women, particularly the older ones, pirouetted in full dresses with hooped petticoats which flared out like lampshades. They wore shawls and little black bowler hats with narrow brims, each two sizes two small for the head on which it precariously perched. Each set of dancers had costumes of the same colourways, and there were red with pinks, greens with yellows and lilacs, blues with purples and reds. An full frontal assault of colours.
The younger girls wore less traditional costumes, more redolent of carnival
than Andean mountain wear. These were wildly decorated with beads and glitter
and appeared to the a cross between Dick Whittington's pantomime costume
and a bunny girl's. Made for fine viewing. Their dancing was more rhythmic
and less graceful than the older women's but, nonetheless, was a complicated
choreograph, interweaving between themselves and their male dancing companions.
The young men's costumes were every bit as elaborate as the girls'. Big boots with bells and doublets with high collars and hanging sleeves, each decorated with embroidered and/or sequined Inca symbols. They looked like a cross between Romeo and a bullfighter at his wedding. Morris dancers never looked like this.
But the Palme D'Or costumes were worn by the older Indian men. Just fantastic constructs of hoops and cardboard which made them look like multi-layered wedding cakes, an impression reinforced by the fact that the abiding colours of their costumes were silver and white. On their heads they wore wigs reminiscent of Harpo Marx, small bowler hats (more Harpo) but (eat your heart out Harpo ) festooned with five enormous multi coloured feathers, sticking up like a fan. Initially the effect was somewhat comical but, within moments, humour subsided as it became obvious that these men were very serious about what they were doing. Their dance, too, was an impressive affair with many complicated steps, twirls, and rattles.
The dozens of groups of dancers and bands would have taken about an hour to pass a single point. I have never witnessed anything like this pageant of rhythm, colour, and tradition.
As it was a dull morning and we had little expectation of fine sights in Lima I didn't take my digital camera, just the small analogue and one film. Of course, I used up the roll in the first half hour. GT, though, captured the entire affair in the usual three formats, so the video alone should make wonderful viewing.
International Rally Bus-Driver !!!
The bus ride back had the usual elements of international rallying danger, passengers bouncing off the roof, plus a busker. This bloke climbed on board with a strange contraption strapped to the front of his chest which looked as if had been fashioned from a rucksack, some electronics and what looked like a speaker. GT was convinced he was going to blow up the bus. Instead he started to croon the most awful ballads through the amplifier strapped to his chest, accompanied by a karaoke-sounding backing. Graham started to giggle while I stared out of the window. He was also the most unlikely looking busker, being about 60 and dressed in a formal corduroy jacket and trousers, neither of which had been cleaned or pressed since the day they were bought fifteen to twenty years ago. He looked like an archaeology lecturer at the local polytechnic. And, it must be said, sounded like it as well.
Jeff 17.09.04 |
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