Thirty six hours after leaving home, twenty seven hours on four different aircraft, and several movies later see me coming into land at Lima, Peru.
After flying over part of the Andes mountains the scenery below is not particularly welcoming. Everything is sort of coffee coloured, well to be honest it's adobe coloured, and that includes the obviously new cars parked in a compound near Lima airport. It is not difficult to make out similarities with Greece...Dust and more dust....
My first views of Peru are that it is a singularly un-prepossessing sort of place, apart from a plethora of car dealerships on the way from the airport, my taxi passes through what is obviously not one of the classiest areas in town, but some things make me feel at home....Like buildings with the reinforcing iron sticking out of the top, the occasional pile of builders rubbish on the side of the road, the odd heap of rocks, the partly completed and now neglected municipal developments along the coast road.....
They say first impressions are the right ones, but in this case they are not quite right. Coming into Lima via Miraflores, which is one of the upmarket suburbs, from the seaside, (the sea is adobe coloured too, but that doesn't stop anyone swimming in it, or going surfing at 7am in the morning), things begin to change, and magically, green hits the eye.
The Peruvians do like their flowers, and here in the public parks, floral bedding that could outdo many a seaside town in the UK, is in full bloom. And there is grass, green grass, in the middle of the desert where they don't get rain only drizzle...And trees that haven't been pruned to death by City Hall.....
I find out later that they use 're-cycled' water for the flower beds and gardens, and what a sensible idea that is...Far more logical than using it to irrigate olive trees to produce olive oil that no one seems to want, judging by the prices paid to the growers.
And then there is the smell......I am used to the smell of poorly serviced scooters and cars spewing fumes into the atmosphere, and an all pervading smell of cigarette smoke, (you in the UK just get diesel fumes, but you are used to it so you do not notice), in Lima you get the smell of LPG as many cars run on it, overlaid with the occasional whiff of garlic.
And amazingly it is not as dusty as it looks! Even the building sites are continuously damped down with a hose and, as in Singapore, trucks leaving a building site are pressure washed, and idea that would go down quite well in Greece when you consider how many building sites there are. (It always amazes me that Greece, which has such a small population needs so many building sites....)
Arriving at my hotel I note the electrified fence along the top of the street wall, and the amazing array of spikes along the top of neighbouring walls along the street, and I begin to worry that what I have read about threats to personal safety may indeed be true.
Whether the threat to safety is real or perceived the Peruvian government are determined to do something about is and the police presence is high with officers on duty, in pairs, day and night. In addition the local municipality also has its own police force who control parking and such matters but they also carry guns.
God help the motorist who parks in the wrong place. In addition there are also private security guards stationed outside banks and offices, and many residential area and condos also have there own private security arrangements at the end of the street.
My hotel is no exception and we have a private guard at the end of the road who lives in a little wooden hut, except in the afternoon when the sun shines into it so he sits on a plastic chair and the shade and goes to sleep. At night he patrols the whole street and after the first night I decide that if he blows that sodding whistle at 1am one more time I will go down there and take the f**cking pea out of it......
The end result of this is that one certainly feels safer, although whether this feeling is real or perceived is another matter.....But there are a number of ways you can ensure your personal safety, or at least minimise your losses...
- Avoid looking like a tourist. In Lima for instance if you wear shorts and sandals you are immediately branded as a tourist.
- Look like you know where you are going. By all means use a map, but pre-plan your route before you leave your hotel and write the directions down on a piece of paper.
- Don't wear loads of jewellery or expensive watches, even if they are imitation. Use a pocket camera.
- Avoid carrying a bag, if you are not carrying one no one can snatch it.
- One of the times you are most vunerable, especially when you are on your own, is when you are taking a photograph, stand with you back to something even if it is only a lamp post, that way you cannot be taken by surprise from behind. (Ha, ha!)
- Only take enough money with you for your immediate needs, and split it up into different pockets. Someone holding you up relies on speed, they are not going to wait while you turn out all your pockets so you minimise your loss.
- At night stick to well lit and busier streets.
Here endeth the first lesson......
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