Saturday, August 29, 2015

Lewis and Clarking It

Friday August 28, 2015

We arrived in Lima around 9am and made our way back to the Dragonfly Hostel. Check in wasn't until 2pm so we set out for our adventure to Barranco, a small resort area of Lima.

Following suggestions from a Vive Peru staff member, we sought out the Burrito Bar which she highly recommended. En route, we walked the shoreline then found the main plaza of Barranco. Similar to the Plaza de Armas in Trujillo, the buildings were painted in bright yellows, reds and blues. We came upon "Iglesia La Ermita". According to a local legend, one night a group of fishermen were lost at sea in dense fog. They prayed for salvation and a luminous cross appeared, guiding them back to shore. The Ermita church was built on the site where the cross allegedly appeared and since then has become the preferred church for fishermen. Although the church was nearly completely destroyed by invading Chilean troops in 1881, is has been rebuilt and is an interesting site to see.

                           
                         










                                                                                       
Employing the help of some locals, we found the unmarked Burrito bar, but had to wait for it to open. We took the time to walk down to the beach and through the streets lined with restaurants. This area reminded me of the houses in Charleston, big buildings with a lot of cast iron details and railings.

The Burrito bar lived up to the high recommendation. They were as big as our heads and weighed about 5 lbs a piece (that is an exaggeration). They served as our lone meal for the day.




After lunch, we wandered in search of the Galleria de Lucia, a public art museum. We came across the Chocolate Museum and I couldn't help but stop in. We went on the tour that taught us the entire process of making chocolate from the tree to the finished chocolate bar. For my little brother who memorized the Magic School Bus episode about this process when he was four, it would have been an excellent review. We tasted the cocoa beans at several stages in the process, and I'm not sure how someone managed to realized that the very bitter starting point could be turned into such a delicious end result, but I'm glad they did.



 We happened to visit several other art museums before we found the Lucia. It houses modern art displays in a beautiful building with intricate tiles.

On our walk back to the hostel we saw several paragliders who use the cliffs along the coast as their launch sites. It is incredible to watch them flip, twirls and navigate over the shore.



The lack of sleep from our bus ride caught up to us around dinner time and we settled into our room as we prepared to say goodbye to MC. She headed off to the airport with a few other Vive Peru volunteers around 6pm. Los Cuatros Estados Unidos has been reduced to just tres and we're terribly sad to see her go.


The night at the hostel was spent catching up on reading, trying some of the Peruvian homebrews the owner of the hostel makes and getting to bed early. Off to Cuzco in the morning!


1 comment:

  1. As soon as I read this, my first thought was, did ze talk about ze picares, and ze mud? magic school bus, all the way!!

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