Since we had gotten to the hotel so late, we decided to be a bit leisurely about our start to this day. We agreed to meet at 9:00 AM in the hotel restaurant, which was more like a Bed & Breakfast spread. Fruit, juice, and fabulous bread were the morning meal.

After breakfast I got a quick shot of our room, which will give you a flavor of El Patio, where rooms are arranged around an open courtyard full of flowers. If you look closely at the first picture, you can see our room door, exactly in the center on the first floor. The doorway just to the right of center, which looks more like a doorway than the one to our room, is actually where the stairs are to get upstairs. And the glassed-in area at the top of the stairs is a little lounge or living room area, and that’s where I’m sitting right now typing this!

Our first stop of the morning was a Museo Larco, a private museum with some wonderful artifacts. We had headed to the National Museum, but Steve recalled it was closed on Mondays, so we went to Museo Larco instead. It had some fabulous artifacts. I’m not going to try to talk about them all or this entry will never end! 🙂

I will say that I’m very glad I decided to go ahead and get a new lens for my Canon Rebel XT camera. The lens cost most than the camera had, but wow, today made it worth it. We couldn’t use a flash inside the museum and the light was pretty low, but I think I got some fabulous shots. You be the judge.

I was really impressed with the one you’ll notice that is so lifelike. Many are obviously mask-like or highly stylized. It doesn’t seem often that you see true-to-life features, but the one sample I’ve included is certainly that. Beautiful.

The close-up of some stitching was a tapestry. I wanted to get close enough to show the needle-work, and the camera did great. It often showed that it didn’t have enough light, but the image stabilization feature really came through.

The unhappy looking man sitting with his legs crossed and hands tied behind his back showed a warrior who lost in the fight. When his enemy got close enough and overpowered him enough to take off his head dress, he became the vanquished. The next stop for him was to be ritually sacrificed. That this practice apparently was common to all cultures, even when they didn’t have contact, says something about how mankind valued individual lives and how they felt they needed to interact with the unseen forces of nature/god/spirit. Hard to understand from our current point of view, but there you are.

I seem to recall reading or seeing today that the point of combat was to get “victims” for sacrifice, and they had highly-developed tools to accomplish the task. Those mean-looking spike heads are just that–the ends they put on clubs to take into battle. Fascinating… and deadly.

The picture that shows the holes in the two skulls shows that they practiced trepanning, opening the skull. The objects to the right of the skulls are the knives they used. Since skulls with these holes show healing around the edges, we know the patients, at least some of them lived after the surgery.

The next few pictures show jewelry of various types. It was pretty intricate work, and the gold was gorgeous. Gold was for those who were very important, of course, especially priests. There were some great examples.

Besides the items in the museum proper, there’s a “Storehouse” with many, many other examples of these objects on display behind glass. I think it’s great they’re open where anyone can walk through and see them.

And the people in the picture are our tour group, minus the photographer, Pam. Left to right (front and back mixed) are Steve, Linda, Gwenn, Franja, Kip, me (Sher), and Wayne.

Right after that is one picture that will have to represent the “erotic” collection. I’m not putting those pictures online since they’re pretty graphic, but they’re quite fascinating, especially when you understand the context of their world-view. The one picture I am showing is of a woman giving birth. Lots of expression in that one picture, I think. I was especially struck by the woman’s head. Speaks volumes, doesn’t it?

The gardens were lovely at the Museo Larco but we didn’t tarry there. We next headed downtown. This is an old city and there are some wonderful buildings and carvings. Very ornate. Unfortunately, this time of year, the skies are dull and gray. Without sunlight, nothing really “popped,” so I didn’t take many pictures.

At the Museo San Francisco & Catacombes, we toured a monastery with a lot of history, and with catacombs that had lots of bones! There were no pictures allowed inside, though, so I’ll skip any discussion of that.

The last picture is just a street scene showing where we walked along a street with lots of shops. I’m not sure it does the experience justice. There was just a constant flow of people and noise. Everyone going somewhere, doing something.

After that, we took a bus to get back to the area where the hotel is. This was an experience in itself as when the doors of the bus open, people push in at the same time people are pushing to get out. Everyone packs in like sardines–no such thing as “personal space”! But everyone is very respectful, so it all seems to work.

Last word today is a note that there don’t seem to be any real straight routes to anywhere we went. Well, there’s one main road that could be called a “freeway,” but that’s mostly not where we went on our taxi rides. It seems like all routes are through back streets. Amazing, and a little frightening since everywhere there are people walking and traffic galore.

Overall impression of Lima a this time of year is that it’s crowded and gray. I’m looking forward to the next leg of our journey. We’re up early tomorrow to head for the airport and then into the Tambopata Nature Reserve. I’m rather doubting they’ll have Wi-Fi there since they don’t have electricity except when they run generators to charge tourists’ electronic gear–at least that’s what I hear. So I may not be updating the blog for the next five days, until we’re in Cusco. I’m going to try to write each day anyway, and will upload the separate days in order, even if not on time.

Until the next!