Tracy Carolyn Photography

All winter long, a grey cloud sits over Lima, keeping it cloudy and 60 degrees all day long – midnight and noon feel the same.  The city itself is no beauty, with giant grey buildings jutting up into the grey sky.  The photo above is the view from our apartment.  What looks like a park is actually the Brazilian Embassy, and what looks like a relatively quiet street is a traffic thoroughfare, whose loud honking we can hear all day long from our 9th floor unit.

Miraflores, where we stayed, is the jewel of Lima.  It’s where the wealthy Peruvians live, where all the tourists stay.  It’s one of the safest neighborhoods in Lima (which is known for its high crime rate), and where the trendy restaurants, flower filled parks, and the largest shopping mall live.

But it simply wasn’t for us.  The grey weather was perfect for sleeping, but not good at motivating us to leave the apartment and explore.  Though I’m not sure what we would have explored if we’d had the inclination.  Lima is the epitome of the big city, and like many big cities it feels like it could be anywhere in the world.  If this had been our first exposure to Peru, I would have felt like I hadn’t visited Peru at all.

The one good part (aside from the ceviche that John has been enjoying) is the Malecon, the beautifully manicured park on the cliffs overlooking the ocean.  The park stretches down the coast and includes a walking and biking trail, playgrounds, mini-gyms with exercise equipment, and stunning views of the coastline.  At least, they would be stunning if there was any sun around here (in the clouds they are a little more obscure than stunning.)

We managed to pass a week here in the city, enjoying the ease of having a fancy grocery store just two blocks away and taking hot showers at any time of the day (after Cusco this felt so luxurious), but we’re ready to leave.  Peru has been good to us for the past six weeks, and now it’s time to try somewhere else.

Tomorrow we say goodbye to Peru and fly to Nicaragua.  Apparently it’s rainy season in Central America, so I’m not exactly sure where we’ll end up.  Feel free to leave a suggestion if you have a favorite spot!

This morning I felt a bit homesick for fall.

I think Facebook is to blame.  I realize that the sweltering hot summer is only just beginning to cool off into the start of autumn in the US, but fall is clearly on its way.  Every post I read this morning seemed to be about hiking amidst the changing leaves, drinking pumpkin spice lattes, enjoying football tailgates, and reporting on sudden mountain snowfalls.  It had me a bit nostalgic for my favorite time of year.  Add in the cloudy and gloomy weather here in Lima, and I was feeling a bit down.

So I decided to get out of our isolated 9th story apartment and into the world.  I took a walk to the coastline, which is just four blocks from our apartment here in Miraflores, Lima.  As I sat on a bench, watching ambitious surfers in wetsuits tackle the freezing waves, the universe smacked me across the face with a healthy dose of gratitude.

Less than a week ago I was hiking in the mountainous jungle of Machu Picchu.  And now, I was sitting on a bench in a beautifully manicured urban park, on a cliff, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Is this really my life?  And am I really complaining about it?

Missing the familiar is only natural when you are traveling, so sometimes I indulge in the 20 minute pity party.  But it only took a few minutes sitting in the ocean breeze to snap out of it.  I’m pretty sure I could find one or two people who would trade a year’s worth of falling leaves and pumpkin spice lattes for what I’ve got going on.  There’s not much room for pity here.

Later in my walk I ran across the graffiti pictured above, stenciled on a wall overlooking the sea, and it made me smile.  (Of course I would stumble across such a yogic saying right when I needed it.)  It translates as “You are here and now.”  Sometimes you just need an external reminder of something you already know.

So as the graffiti (and every yoga teacher worldwide) commands, I’ll be here, now.  I’ll hush up about missing fall, and enjoy all of the amazingness in front of me.

Well said, graffiti.  Well said.

John and I have recently had to come to grips with the fact that we are old and married.  This is not new information, mind you, but after the notorious late-night party scene of Cusco failed to lure us out of our apartment more than once during our month long stay, we’ve had to fully admit to our fuddy-duddyness.  (That’s a word, right?)

Back in June we owned up to our “Old-and-Crotchety” status after realizing we could not party like frat boys for a week on Cape Cod.  Now it seems that even going out for drinks after 10pm is beyond our reach.  I’m convinced we aren’t missing out on all that much, but sometimes it makes me sad to know that I’m so old at heart while still actually being in my 20s.  Granted, it is the last year of my 20s, but still.

All of this to say that our big Saturday night out this week wasn’t to visit the clubs or bars, but to see the Circuito Magico del Agua – a family friendly park full of fountains that lights up at night.  As soon as we walked in (after leaving the drunken crowds of Mistura), we knew we had arrived in our element.

Was it because there were couples having their wedding photos taken all over the park? (It’s a bit of an occupational hazard that I feel comfortable in these places.)  Was it because families with young children were safely roaming around after dark without concerns of the dangers of Lima?  Or because there wasn’t a 10 foot long line for the bar and a 20 foot long line for the bathrooms?

Who knows.  What I do know is that we had a good time wandering around the beautiful gardens, checking out the 13 different dancing fountains and listening to the piped in classical music.

Maybe I am old and boring and married, but I derived more joy from my S./4 fountain visit than I probably would have from a S./12 Pisco Sour at Mistura.

So at the very least, being boring is cheaper.  What an old and crotchety thing to say.

After weeks of hearing “don’t eat ceviche in Cusco, wait until Lima,” John finally got to have his first taste of delicious Peruvian ceviche.  It came from the winner of Best Ceviche at Mistura 2011 – and from what I heard, it was good.

We first heard about the food festival Mistura from Erick, the chef who taught our cooking class in Cusco.  He told us that people fly in from all over the world to attend this festival, and that he and his new wife were going to Lima for their honeymoon to enjoy Mistura for a week.  Any food event that draws a chef for his honeymoon sounded worth trying.  So we went on Saturday, the second to last day of the festival.

The event is mostly like a giant “Taste Of” fest, with several booths that each serve generous portions of two different dishes.  The festival also included a giant market, a Pisco and coffee lounge, a chocolate bazaar, and a giant kitchen where chefs were baking fresh bread all day long.  Many of the “rustic restaurant” booths featured meat cooking over large open flames, or being smoked in enormous barrels.  The lines for those booths looked to be 30-45 minutes long, so we stuck to the shorter lines at the more modern booths – we were hungry, after all.

In addition to the ceviche, we sampled yucca mashed with garlic and vegetables, traditional corn cake with salad, and the winner of Best Lomo Saltado at Mistura 2011.  Everything was really quite tasty.  I’m sure we could have sampled more interesting dishes if we could tell what they were – it’s hard to know what you’re getting when you don’t know all the fancy foodie vocab words in Spanish.

The lines were massive at this event, and the crowds were huge.  Just as at any taste event, there was a confusing means of payment – you had to buy a card at one place, top it up at another, and the denominations were odd.  After a bit we were just put off by the large shoving crowds and we decided to leave.  But I’m glad we went.  It was a unique way to sample some yummy local fare from some of the best restaurants in Peru, and gave us our first slice of life here in Lima.

After a month in Cusco, the anticipation for Machu Picchu grew rather intense.  Nearly everyone we met would ask us if we’d been yet, if we were hiking the trail, and when we were going.  People couldn’t believe it took us a month in Cusco before we went.

So could it possibly live up to that kind of hype?  Could we possibly enjoy it as much as we thought?

The answer was yes.  This place is majestic.

Now in all fairness, it does look exactly like every photo of it you’ve ever seen.  But then there are amazingly steep mountains surrounding it, which you cannot properly appreciate without really being there.

And you don’t really get a sense for the scale of the ruins from photos, either.  It’s quite large, and in really excellent condition.

Scholars don’t actually know what Machu Picchu was used for, so we decided to skip using a guide.  All they can tell you is theory and conjecture, anyway.  Instead we made up our own tour.  “This is where the Incas performed improv comedy, and that is where the zip line ran from one condo building to the next.”  You know, insightful commentary like that.

Of course, there are terraces for doing yoga poses…at least that’s what I decided they were for.

You really do have to get there early in the morning to avoid the crowds.  We were up before 5am and were on the second busload to the ruins.  Totally worth the early wake up call to be there before sunrise (and the 2500 other tourists who visit daily.)

These llamas have to tolerate every tourist coming up to pet them, but in return they enjoy excellent mountain views and a buffet of grass.  Not a bad gig.

After wandering the ruins for a few hours, it was time to climb Huayna Picchu, the tall peak that you can see in the middle of the first photo (it’s the iconic peak you see behind the ruins in all of these photos.)  Only 400 people are allowed to do it daily, and we had to sign up in advance.  The climb took about an hour and has some serious stairs.  It’s a very steep climb, with a beautiful view of the mountains and the ruins from the other side.

After we descended Huayna Picchu (no small feat), we continued on to climb down the mountain from the ruins rather than taking the bus.  That winding road in the photo above is the top portion of the road the bus takes – we did the stairwell that cuts through it and continues all the way down.  It was intense.  Only after we made it down did we learn it is over 4,000 stairs to the bottom of the valley.  Trust me, going down 4,000 steep stairs isn’t as easy on your legs as you may think.

We’re still working through the soreness, but at least now we are down at sea level in Lima.  No more hills and stairs to climb like Cusco – finally our legs can have a bit of a rest!