The flight from Atlanta to Lima is forever flying over darkness. We are wedged into a wholly full 767 and although I have a window, it is an imperfect window, directly behind the wing and therefore right behind an engine, which means - ah, loud. Loud and loud and loud again, the frame of the plane vibrating dully around me, unhappily. Unlike most long flights I've had in the past (to and from Europe), we do not have little screens embedded into the seat in front, and I think there is even less leg room on this plane than on others. The movie plays on a few small screens in the aisles and one big one way in the front. I ignore the movie, which I can barely see, and listen to Sun Kil Moon, but the engine is too loud for Sun Kil Moon, so it is Okkervil River and The Shins and so on. The music is to mark time, to get through the flight. I love watching the progress of the plane on the touchscreen (love? well, there are few things to love about long flights and I want to know that I am going somewhere, that I am over something, what the hell those lights might be, down there, beneath me) and get to watch our path over Florida, over Cuba. Then the map flickers off and We Have a Zoo Now with Matt Damon is playing and I am left in the dark as to where we might be.
There is food, invariably, on an international flight and, invariably, it will be better in the other direction than it will be on the USA-to-whereever leg. This is not an overnight flight, but a 5 p.m. to midnight flight with an extra hour wedged in by a one-hour time difference. Sleep would still be welcome, but I know it won't happen. I read Hiram Bingham and Elizabeth Gaskell and play the train game on my phone, but the plane vibrates too much for the train game and I have to squint. The woman in front of me has a toddler in her lap, and later I recognize her in line at the Atlanta airport heading back through customs. Much later, I mean - two weeks later, when we are coming home.
We have a good bit of turbulance, and in the distance there are thunderstorms over islands or... sea. That chick from that Bill Murray movie set in Japan (Scarlet Johannssen!) is on the screen, so I still do not know where I am. Over the Carribean? Panama? - but the lightning looks like some skyburst from this perspective, above and away, and soon enough I am able to see a handful of stars scattered brilliantly all the way to the horizon. Which is curved up here.
Immigration and customs in Lima take forever. We are given some white card we have to carry around along with our Passports and present to every hotel to prove we aren't attempting to immigrate to Peru illegally, and invariably I chose the wrong line. I know this when the immigration agent gets up to go take a piss or something in the middle of processing a nice American tourist couple three deep ahead of me, while the people who were behind me in the endlessly snaking line have been set free to go collect their bags and slip through customs. Where there is a magic button to determine whether they will X-ray you and all your baggaged before you enter the country.
Lima is warm and the sky is gray. The temperature seems the same - 65 to 70, day and night - blanketed in a cool, damp fog that comes from the cold Pacific but does not precisely cling to it, so much as it coats the sky like a film. Some days, an oddly claustrophobic film. Here are my first impressions: is that a four-story tall fast food chicken restaurant with a glass front and a spiral slide down to the first floor? Technically we are moving too fast through chaotic streets to get all those thoughts out at once, but we pass three more versions of the place so I am able to sting all these thoughts together later.
Then: KFC! Pizza Hut! and both deliver. On the backs of little motorbikes, primarily. There are several KFCs and Pizza Huts and a few combinations of the two, sometimes folded into bright perfect confections of American gas stations that lack the familiar brand names, a strange variety of buses and forbidding looking home-and-store fronts with high fences topped with: broken glass, razor wire, and/or spikes. Perhaps a quarter of structures in the port area have rebar sticking up at the corners, ready for the next phase of construction - next year, maybe. Or five years after that.
Then abruptly we are on a highway by the sea. Wedged between these sere, steeply eroded cliffs and the ocean. It's late on a random Tuesday, but traffic is steady. Miraflores - the neighborhood in which our hotel is located - is new and wealthy. It does not feel like I am on another continent, in another hemisphere, bordering an ocean I have not seen since I was in Hawaii years ago.
I think Miraflores seems like Miami, except I've not been to Miami (and honestly have no desire to go?), though there is also something forbidding about all the high, blank walls, the lack of front gardens and open front stoops. The hotel looks as cold and strange as all the local streets until we are past the front wall and find ourselves in a small front garden. After that, Hotel El Tambo is lovely. Small and local, with a tiny elevator (but larger than the Tulip Hotel in Amsterdam, which could fit one person and suitcase at a time) and these lovely, breezy public spaces including a small white-walled central courtyard with a lovely pink splash of bouganvilla. I don't really like the bed or the room these first two nights, but after Hotel Samay (hardest beds ever?) and Hotel Santaurio (holy bugs batman) I will be glad to come back here. I would stay an extra week if I could.
There is food, invariably, on an international flight and, invariably, it will be better in the other direction than it will be on the USA-to-whereever leg. This is not an overnight flight, but a 5 p.m. to midnight flight with an extra hour wedged in by a one-hour time difference. Sleep would still be welcome, but I know it won't happen. I read Hiram Bingham and Elizabeth Gaskell and play the train game on my phone, but the plane vibrates too much for the train game and I have to squint. The woman in front of me has a toddler in her lap, and later I recognize her in line at the Atlanta airport heading back through customs. Much later, I mean - two weeks later, when we are coming home.
We have a good bit of turbulance, and in the distance there are thunderstorms over islands or... sea. That chick from that Bill Murray movie set in Japan (Scarlet Johannssen!) is on the screen, so I still do not know where I am. Over the Carribean? Panama? - but the lightning looks like some skyburst from this perspective, above and away, and soon enough I am able to see a handful of stars scattered brilliantly all the way to the horizon. Which is curved up here.
Immigration and customs in Lima take forever. We are given some white card we have to carry around along with our Passports and present to every hotel to prove we aren't attempting to immigrate to Peru illegally, and invariably I chose the wrong line. I know this when the immigration agent gets up to go take a piss or something in the middle of processing a nice American tourist couple three deep ahead of me, while the people who were behind me in the endlessly snaking line have been set free to go collect their bags and slip through customs. Where there is a magic button to determine whether they will X-ray you and all your baggaged before you enter the country.
Lima is warm and the sky is gray. The temperature seems the same - 65 to 70, day and night - blanketed in a cool, damp fog that comes from the cold Pacific but does not precisely cling to it, so much as it coats the sky like a film. Some days, an oddly claustrophobic film. Here are my first impressions: is that a four-story tall fast food chicken restaurant with a glass front and a spiral slide down to the first floor? Technically we are moving too fast through chaotic streets to get all those thoughts out at once, but we pass three more versions of the place so I am able to sting all these thoughts together later.
Then: KFC! Pizza Hut! and both deliver. On the backs of little motorbikes, primarily. There are several KFCs and Pizza Huts and a few combinations of the two, sometimes folded into bright perfect confections of American gas stations that lack the familiar brand names, a strange variety of buses and forbidding looking home-and-store fronts with high fences topped with: broken glass, razor wire, and/or spikes. Perhaps a quarter of structures in the port area have rebar sticking up at the corners, ready for the next phase of construction - next year, maybe. Or five years after that.
Then abruptly we are on a highway by the sea. Wedged between these sere, steeply eroded cliffs and the ocean. It's late on a random Tuesday, but traffic is steady. Miraflores - the neighborhood in which our hotel is located - is new and wealthy. It does not feel like I am on another continent, in another hemisphere, bordering an ocean I have not seen since I was in Hawaii years ago.
I think Miraflores seems like Miami, except I've not been to Miami (and honestly have no desire to go?), though there is also something forbidding about all the high, blank walls, the lack of front gardens and open front stoops. The hotel looks as cold and strange as all the local streets until we are past the front wall and find ourselves in a small front garden. After that, Hotel El Tambo is lovely. Small and local, with a tiny elevator (but larger than the Tulip Hotel in Amsterdam, which could fit one person and suitcase at a time) and these lovely, breezy public spaces including a small white-walled central courtyard with a lovely pink splash of bouganvilla. I don't really like the bed or the room these first two nights, but after Hotel Samay (hardest beds ever?) and Hotel Santaurio (holy bugs batman) I will be glad to come back here. I would stay an extra week if I could.
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