We left Costa Rica early in the morning, changed planes in Bogota, Columbia, and arrived in Lima at about 5:00 p.m. After the chaos of our arrival in Costa Rica, we were pleasantly surprised to see the pre-arranged taxi driver holding up a sign with our names on it and the name of our hotel, Villa Molina. What a relief!
However, if the traffic in Guatemala was crazy and in San Jose, it was insane, the traffic in Lima was ten times worse than both of them. Traffic lights were almost non-existent and nobody paid much attention to traffic lanes. At intersections, it was basically a free-for-all. But our driver was experienced and got us to our hotel by 8:30pm. We went straight to bed.
In the morning we were able to enjoy a substantial breakfast and the beautiful courtyard of our hotel.
We had only one day in Lima. The main purpose of taking this layover was to have dinner at Central (accent on the last syllable), a restaurant featured in the Netflix series, Chef’s Table. It is currently rated number 4 in the world. We’ll get to that later. First, we had to decide what to do with our day in Lima. In the hotel lobby there were brochures for the usual city bus tours, but we didn’t have any desire to spend a lot of time in that crazy traffic. A brochure about a tour of an ancient Inca site, the Pachacamac Citadel, caught my eye. We were able to arrange to join the morning excursion on short notice and a van picked us up at the hotel.
On the way to Pachacamac, we drove through some neighborhoods of Lima and so got a bit of a city tour anyway. We were struck by the contrast between the modern Lima of high rises and modern shopping areas and some of the neighborhoods we passed through of adobe brick buildings with tin roofs, rough streets, and scruffy kids.
Our guide was a young woman who first took us through the museum at Pachacamac before taking us out to explore the surrounding ruins. She explained that the Incas were actually the last of four civilizations to build at this site, each group building on the base of the previous people. The Pachacamac god was considered the “earth maker” by the people who lived in this part of Peru before the Incas. The site is very large with many buildings that have been restored. Below is a model of it in the museum.
The air here is so dry that archeologists found quite a collection of artifacts in very good condition including a weaving with still brilliant colors.
The main building that we visited was the Sun Temple, a pyramid-like structure. We also walked around a building where specially chosen young girls were trained to serve the emperor cooking, weaving, etc., or in some cases being sacrificed to the Sun God. And, we saw part of an Inca road connecting this area with other parts of the Inca Empire.
In Cusco and Machu Picchu, we saw other parts of the Inca road network. But that’s for later.
Returning from our Pachacamac excursion, we were dropped off at Larcomar, a fancy shopping and dining area in the Miraflores district on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific ocean.
We had a delicious lunch and the first of many pisco sours, the national drink of Peru. We then returned to the hotel for a cool shower after a hot day and a rest to get ready for our dinner at Central. That dinner is going to be a whole post by itself.
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