Landing in Lima

I arrived in Lima at 6:30 a.m. on the red-eye from Dallas.  And boy were my eyes red. We boarded at 10 p.m., but our 10:30 take-off was delayed for an hour, so we didn’t get into the air until 11.  I eagerly waited for us to reach altitude, reclined my chair, and promptly went to sleep before (and during and after) dinner was served. I know tomorrow will be a long day, so I need all the rest I can get. By the time I got through customs/passport control, it was 7 a.m., but my driver was there ready to go.  We hopped in the car and drove.  And drove and drove.  Well, driving implies we moved, which only happened sporadically.  Lima is a HUGE city.  Just huge. And traffic on a normal morning rush-hour (which I’m now in the middle of since I didn’t land at 5:30 a.m.) is pretty gnarly.  However, today is Peruvian Flag Day, and there are some parades/celebrations and there are some roads that are closed. So it takes an hour and 20 minutes to get to the hotel. I arrive just in time to check in, drop my bags with the valet until my room is ready, and my guide for the morning tour is already waiting for me in the lobby. 

Morning Market and Cooking Tour

I was sure that I’d be exhausted from the overnight flight, so I scheduled a guided market tour and cooking class for this morning, so I wasn’t out by myself while too exhausted to be vigilant. I kind of expected to have an hour to chill out and have breakfast before going on my tour.  Instead, I was in the hotel bathroom, frantically changing from my plane clothes into something more comfortable for traveling the city.

We jumped into the van and went to the Surquillo district, Market No. 2. Here, they showed me around the market.  Stalls selling potatoes, 30 kinds of potatoes. Stalls selling dozens of varieties of corn. Stalls with an unimaginable variety of strangely shaped tropical fruits. Stalls selling pre-chopped vegetables for quick weeknight meals.  And of course, stalls selling all manner of animals (meat), both whole and in parts. 

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After the market tour, we headed back to the Haku Kitchen to prepare lunch from the various foods we had purchased. The first step was to prepare everything for cooking.  We spend about an hour chopping and washing and preparing the many vegetables. Everything is cooked in clay pots and the garlic is mashed with a stone mortar and pestle. Hardcore authentic.  

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Then we sit down and have some appetizer snacks.  The first course of lunch.  This consists of 2 salsas, which we made.  One is a spicy salsa, with tons of freshly smashed garlic, lime juice, and red pepper.  The other is a mango salsa, with mango, lime juice, onions, and cilantro.  The salsas were served with cancha, a super delicious roasted corn, and plantain chips.  The cancha is made from a type of corn that, when toasted, pops like popcorn on the inside, but the kernel remains intact. So it looks whole, but the inside is soft and squishy. The spicy salsa was quite spicy, but with a lot of that ‘white’ heat from the garlic to compliment the ‘red’ heat of peppers. The mango salsa was sweet and tangy with a little kick from the onions. 

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Next, we sliced all of the fruits we had purchased at the market.  They let me point at all of the ones I had never seen before and we bought them all 🙂  I scored pretty well on the exotic fruit naming challenge.  Our fruits were: passionfruit, cherimoya, cucumber melon, golden cherries, starfruit, a red and a green cactus fruit, sachtomate, and lucuma.  I have had some of them, but I’ll go through the list. The sachtomate is a tree tomato…. it’s less of a fruit and more of a tomato.  Cucumber melon is a melon, but it has such a mild, not very sweet flavor, that it is kind of refreshing like a cucumber. The guides speak Spanish, and refer to it as a pepino melon, and some of my high school Spanish comes back to me…. via the VeggieTales ‘Dance of the Tomato’ song.  Miran el pepino….  Moving on. Next, I tried the golden cherries. They are sweet, a little tart, and have a million tiny seeds, so they have a gritty, sandy texture. The starfruit was very tart, but still nice and tropical. Passionfruit, to me, smells like human sweat.  I hate the smell of passionfruit juice, but I don’t mind the flavor.  It’s a very distinct flavor. Next, we try the cactus fruits.  We are in the territory of fruits you need instructions to eat.  They have big seeds in them, so I am told to just gently chew them, and swallow the seeds whole.  They taste very similar, slightly sweet, gritty/mushy like an overripe pear. Next is cherimoya, one of my favorites.  Called a ‘custard apple’, cherimoya has flesh that is just smooth and creamy and sweet and mildly banana-esque in flavor.  But mostly custard.  I am told that, in Peru, eating fruit before a meal is believed to aid in digestion.  Never eat fruit after a meal, because the other foods can keep the fruit in your stomach too long, causing it to ferment.  Interesting. Finally, the best of all fruits.  We ate the lucuma.  I was expecting a tangy mango flavor, as the color and texture are very similar to mango.  But no. This is a complex sugar fruit.  It tastes of palm sugar… or dates… honey/molasses/maple.  Those types of very complex sugar mixtures.  It is often combined with caramel.  And it is often used to replace caramel and served with chocolate cakes and ice creams.  It was so unexpectedly delicious.  I must find out how to get this at home….

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Next, we prepare causa.  This is a potato dish, and was really one of my favorite things.  We boiled and peeled some yellow potatoes, added salt, pepper, vegetable oil, and some pureed orange chili peppers. And then mashed them by hand.  I had a fun time kneading the potatoes into submission.  Oh!  and lime juice.  Lots of lime juice.  This is a deliciously tart dish.  We then pressed the mashed potatoes into a mold, making a thin bottom layer. We added a filling of chicken, quinoa, green beans and carrots, all cooked together. Then a final layer of mashed potatoes on top.  We garnished with some hot salsa and sliced avocados. Then we removed the mold and our beautiful layered potato dish was complete. This was as fun to make as it was delicious.  Definitely my favorite dish of the day. And it has a great presentation.  I will make this for my next dinner party, for sure. 

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For the main course, we prepared aji de gallina.  This is a chicken dish of shredded chicken in a chili-cream sauce.  It’s mildly spicy, but not hot, and the spices are all dark spices, almost like a curry.  This was served with rice, corn, and a slice of potato.  This is a special kind of potato, that you can cook in the clay pot with no water.  The skin was blackened, so we peeled it away, and the inside of the potato is cooked, and has a delicious smoky flavor. After lunch, we were all stuffed.  My guides Felipe and Marcelo were so warm and welcoming and I had such a lovely time. Haku tours is a non-profit tour company to introduce people to Peruvian culture and raise money for the impoverished of Lima. If you’re in the area, check them out. They were totally amazing.

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 Felipe walked me back to the street my hotel was on and showed me where an ATM was, but I have not been able to get my card to work here.  He took me to a red-vested guy on the street and helped me exchange some US dollars for peruvian soles. Then off I went, back to the hotel to call my bank.  None of the Peru numbers for Wells Fargo worked, and I was beginning to panic about my ability to access cash on this trip.  I was even more panicked when I couldn’t log in to my wells fargo account online. This I will deal with when I get home.  But… I was able to go online and live chat with a person at Bank of America, and get a PIN for my credit card, and the ATM accepted that.  So we’re good. 

I was able to check in to my hotel room, which had been generously upgraded to a suite, thanks Dazzler Lima.  My room was nice and spacious, and I immediately took a nap.  So tired.  After a red-eye from Dallas, I am not jet-lagged, but still not rested. 

Huaca Pucllana

After an hour nap, it’s 4 p.m., so I drag myself out to go explore the world. First, I walked to Huaca Pucllana.  This is a pre-Incan temple located right in the middle of Lima. There are no un-guided tours, so I waited the 10 minutes for the English tour to start. It was an interesting historical perspective.  The different groups that existed here before the Incas, and how each one took over and used this temple for different purposes. There’s also a very fancy restaurant here that looks out at the pyramid, but it was far too early for that. 

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Walk through town

So from there, I walked through the Cat Park, known for its numerous stray cats that live there.  People visit the park and pet/feed/care for the cats.  Then on through innumerable city streets full of all kinds of food stalls, night clubs and bars, and trendy upscale breweries.  I was definitely approaching the fancy side of town as I walked toward the LarcoMar.  This is a huge outdoor shopping area with lots of shops, restaurants, and all of the trendy people.  Most of the shops were ones you could find anywhere, but you know, fancy.  But I did find a nice restaurant to have dinner at while sitting outside overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  That’s just how I roll.

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Dinner time

I, of course, started my meal with the famous ‘pisco sour’ cocktail.  This was unexpectedly delicious, as I don’t often care for any other ‘sour’ drinks. It’s nice and light and a little foamy. Yum. I ordered 2 appetizers for dinner: papas rellenas and ceviche.  Yes, I ordered ceviche.  Might as well give it a shot.  The papas rellenas were delicious.  This is a dish of mashed potatoes, stuffed with beef/egg/vegetable stew, and then deep fried, served with some dipping sauces.  None of those things are bad, so this was awesome. The spicy dipping sauce was my favorite, but I think that’s because I am mentally expecting things to taste more like Mexican food, so I’m gravitating towards spicy. The ceviche was actually pretty mild, in terms of fish flavor.  The amount of actual seafood in it was actually pretty minimal.  Lots of onions and lime juice and peppers. I also didn’t order the like, bowl of ceviche.  I got a thing where it is served on 5 little fried tortilla-type things, each with a spoonful of ceviche on it.  I ate 3 of the 5, which probably means this was the best ceviche ever prepared and everyone else on earth will love it.  But hey, I ate some fish.  I tried the most popular local dish. And I was ok. From there, it was time for dessert.  I got a tres leches cake and a lucuma-chocolate torte, because why not both?  The tres leches cake was, of course completely delicious.  The lucuma- chocolate torte was good.  It was a lucuma custard over a crispy chocolate brownie layer.  I ate the chocolate  first, then the lucuma part, because fruits and chocolate do not belong together.  Not in my face. 

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After dinner, I took an uber to the Magic Water Circuit.  This was a fun and relaxing place to hang out.  There are 14 or so giant water fountains and, at night, they light up with different colors.  It’s beautiful. There’s a little train that goes through the park for kids to ride.  There’s a bunch of food vendors, and some rides for kids.  But the fountains are the main point. The first one on the circuit was a huge round fountain with beautiful stone arches around it with benches for people to sit and watch.  Lots of actual locals just hanging out, as the mist from the fountains really makes this place cooler than the rest of the city.  It has its own microclimate. The next fountain is the main one.  It’s a huge row of fountains, maybe 100 yards long, with a walkway on either side. Just massive.  And the lights under it make it into a rainbow, and various colors alternating.  It’s really cool.  Next, I walked by the children’s area. Here, there are a ton of vendors for food. I saw a booth that sells Inka Cola, so of course I started with that.  It’s … very very sweet.  It’s a little bubble-gum-y, a lot like a concentrate of cream soda.  Just buy a Jones Cream Soda, and you’ll get the gist.  I had a few sips and couldn’t hang.  Next, I saw a booth selling picarones.  These are sweet potato donuts that my tour guide had recommended that I go try after lunch, but I was too busy figuring out the $$ situation. So now I try these.  They’re 5 for $3, so I pay for a ticket to get some, but ask the lady for only one.  My Spanish is getting quite good (at least for numbers and basic stuff). She gives me 2, and then pours the liquid glaze over them.  But, in the end, the glaze is concentrated molasses and…. star anise.  This is going to be a them for the next week.  Apparently that licorice flavor is very popular around here. So I gave up on that too.  Good thing I had a huge dinner.  Next, there’s a cool water tunnel. There’s a security guard there blowing the whistle to keep people from running, pushing others into the water, or touching the water (which causes it to fall on other people).  I take some selfies and keep moving. There is one more very unique fountain: the labyrinth.  There is a line to get into this one, as only 20 people are allowed in.  So I just watch.  It’s a circular maze, with water spouts randomly shooting up in random places, eventually spouting up in a specific pattern.  There is a way to get to the center without stepping over a water spout, but you’re also likely to get splashed. There were 2 more fountains.  They were pretty. 

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After that, I finally gave up and went to my room and collapsed.  It has been almost 48 hours, no shower, no real sleep.  I’m exhausted. I’ll go through my overall impressions and observations of Lima. Lima is a HUGE city.  Like, it feels like the biggest city I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to a lot of big cities.  Part of what makes it feel so big is that it is so crowded. There are people everywhere all the time. Traffic never ceases.  Buses are full. Everything feels shoulder-to-shoulder.  It’s a sprawling city.  Located in an earthquake prone area, all of the building are brick and ~4 stories tall.  There are not really a bunch of skyscrapers.  There are some newer apartment buildings that are quite tall, but most of the city is a sprawl of gated, graffittied maze of narrow streets with tons of cars.  It’s not ‘bad’ necessarily, but a very different vibe.  More like a southeast Asian city than anything.  Personal space is not a thing.  Traffic is crazy.  There are lines marked on the road and there are traffic signals, but don’t expect any of those things to have meaning.  Don’t rent a car in Lima, like ever. Learning to cross the street involves me waiting for a local person to cross and then following them. At least, if a car is going to run over me, it’ll have to run over 2 people.  Haha, I’m so good at logic. Also, there are no regulations about car markings or horns, as about 40% of the cars have altered their horns to sound like police/ambulance/fire vehicles.  It’s so prevalent that I can’t imagine how an actual emergency vehicle gets through the city.  Aside from those things, it’s a bustling city.  There are always people out.  There is so much to see and do, you can’t possibly do it in a day.  There’s a ton of history.  A near infinite amount of culinary exploration to be done. The food is just unbelievable.  I will say my favorite food was the food I cooked myself, but I had help 😉  It’s definitely a push outside my comfort zone, as far as personal safety is concerned, but it is certainly an interesting place to visit.