Gym's Ramblings: Last Days in Lima

Last days in Lima

I must apologize, we have been home for more than a week now and I wasn’t finished telling you about Peru. Let me finish the story.

On Wednesday, May 9^th, we needed to checkout of the Country Club Hotel and move to the JW Marriot in the Miraflores District. Before leaving though, we arranged to combine the hotel transfer with a private tour of the capital. That way, we could see some of the sights in the central Lima and move our luggage to the new location. The concierge at the Country Club Hotel arranged the tour through a firm called Peruvision and an hour later at 11:30 AM, a nice car pulled up with a guide and a driver. We loaded up the luggage into the trunk and then we went downtown.

There is so much to see in Lima. There are numerous museums, public buildings, churches and parks and they are all open to the public. My advice is to review the attractions that are popular in the online travel sights and then get a good local guide. Our guide came with an itinerary that included two venues that I really wanted to see and the rest of the planned route sounded great too. As usual, I would keep the guide busy with reams of questions and Mrs. Gym recorded the sights with her trusty camera.

Our driver let us out at Plaza Mayor, which is a very good place to start. This is where Francisco Pizarro founded the city in 1535. Today, the buildings facing the square are prime Peruvian examples of the baroque style of architecture. The buildings are brightly painted in yellows and oranges and most have ornate protruding balconies. The most notable buildings that surround Plaza Mayor are the Government Palace, the Cathedral of Lima, the Archbishop’s Palace of Lima and the Municipal Palace of Lima.

The cool area around Plaza Mayor

Archbishop's Palace taken from Plaza Mayor - a great example of baroque accents
and the protruding wooden balconies that are everywhere around Plaza Mayor

Plaza Mayor - looking toward Government Palace
where the government of Peru does its thing

The fountain in the middle of Plaza Mayor

Our guide’s name was Mirabel. She may have been diminutive in stature but she had a larger-than-life personality and a vast knowledge of the subject matter. Unfortunately, we had just missed the changing of the guards and the Government Palace is not open to the public but it was still interesting to have been as close as a 9-iron shot from all of Peru’s federal power brokers. In addition, the Municipal Palace dominates one corner of the square, so in addition to the national bureaucracy, the municipal government building also faces the square. What we were here to see in detail though was the Cathedral, and the burial place of Francisco Pizarro.

Peruvian guide Mirabel

Municipal Palace from Plaza Mayor

Cathedral of Lima from Plaza Mayor

The tomb of the famous conquistador is directly to your right as you come though the front entrance. There is ornate tile on the floors and walls of the chapel and the tomb is off to one side. It is interesting to note that they had to replace the remains once when they found Francisco’s real remains in a crypt under the church and realized they had some other guy buried there for a century or so.

Tomb of Pizarro

Stunning tile artwork in Pizarro's chapel

Another famous guy that spent some time here while he was alive was Pope John Paul II. He made two visits, the first in 1985 and a second, in 1988. These trips to Peru were made during the height of the terrorist troubles in the country. In 1985, he endowed two crowns to the Virgin de la Evangelizacion. Then he came again in 1988 and gifted a rosary to the same chapel.

Pope John Paul II twice left priceless gifts for this chapel.
In 1985 he he left two white gold crowns and in 1988 a
priceless rosary.

Numerous other beautiful chapels line-up along the sides of the cathedral and for centuries, if your family was rich enough and dedicated enough to a chapel you could ensure that you had secured a place in the tombs underneath that chapel, as a burial place for your family.

One of numerous beautiful chapels
along the side of the Cathedral

another chapel

another

and another

a good shot from the back of the cathedral looking to the alter

Our next stop was the Convento de San Francisco. It is located about two blocks behind the cathedral. This place is famous for the incredible artwork that adorns the exterior walls between the church and the monastery and its catacombs. It is an interesting place to visit because it is the only church in Lima where you can descend into the catacombs and view the bones of 70,000 faithful that are on display. For the most part, these folks were buried by sprinkling the bodies with lime and then stacking them in 5-meter deep, common graves. The burials took place between 1673 and 1808 and because none of the bodies are new, the only things that are left today are femurs, humerus bones and skulls. All the rest has turned to ash. They actually did some kind of sorting recently and have stacked most of the bones in neat piles. It is a startling to see the massive piles of thousands of these bones neatly stacked in the 5-meter deep pits. It makes you wonder what it smelled like upstairs at Sunday morning mass all those years prior to the last burial.

Monastery of San Francisco is to the left of this photo and
the church below which the catacombs are located is pictured here.
Sadly when we descended into the catacombs we were not allowed to
photograph all those neatly piled bones

Having toured central Lima and two pretty cool historic sites, we jumped in the car and headed toward the beach. Our next hotel was in the Miraflores District. Remind me to never rent a car while in Lima. A wise man from Cusco once told us that in Peru, red lights are only a suggestion and crosswalks painted on the roads are just decoration. As we made our way to the JW Marriott in Miraflores District, we learned that lines on the road to divide lanes were decoration too. Describing the traffic as chaotic though, would be going too far. There seems to be some kind of order to the traffic. It is that the bold triumph and the meek that perish. If you want to get anywhere, you simply pick a line and you press forward, never looking in the rearview mirror. To be honest, there are less scrapes on Peruvian’s cars than there are on Canadians cars.

What we tried to show here was how there is a total disregard for lane
lines which are neatly drawn on the roads.

The JW Marriott in Miraflores District is not only an ultra-modern landmark built on top of the cliffs, overlooking the Pacific, it is the epitome of that real estate credo, “location, location, location”. The hotel has a beautiful view, the nearby shopping venues are outstanding and the neighboring community is safe and full of character. Mrs. Gym and I camped out at the Marriott for our last two nights, we did some shopping and we explored the neighborhood around the hotel. On Saturday morning, we said goodbye to Lima and boarded an Air Canada jet that would return us to our home and native land.