Lima Photos


Lima has to be one of the few places on earth that is always cloudy, but never rains. It is infamous for being shrouded by gray fog and it lived up to its reputation while I was there. At one point Lima was one of the greatest colonial cities with amazing architecture, but changing times and earthquakes have left it a shell of its former self. The majority of the outskirts of the city are slums and ghettos and the city has earned itself a reputation as a dangerous place. While I did walk through some fairly sketchy streets, I spent most of my time in the city center and in the gringo neighborhood of Miraflores, both of which seemed like quite fine areas. And to be honest, the slums the that bus drove through on the way into town seemed better than some of the areas I wandered through in Jakarta.

I only stayed in Lima for one night because I didn't want to lose my hard earned altitude acclimatization before heading back into thin air in the hiking town of Huaraz, my next stop. In my short time in the city, I did a whirlwind tour of the major sites and made a couple of stops to the U.S. embassy to get some blank pages added to my passport to make room for more visas. The catacombs of Convento San Francisco were quite eerie. The skeletons had been taken apart, the bones categorized by type, and then replaced in piles. Pictures were forbidden for some silly reason, but I managed to snap a few anyway. It was very strange to be looking a pile of human bones and the look up through a grate and be able to see the altar of the church above.