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Jan 16 - Aug 31, 1999

Fear, Love and Laughter

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Lima and Peru, Part 2: The Bad

Manfred P.

Keywords: Peru, Lima, Miraflores, San Isidro, tourist, travel trip report, travel log, travelogue.

Fear, Love and Laughter. These are just a few of the many sides of Lima. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Lima is a trilogy. This is "Part 2: The Bad" of this trilogy. For all the good aspects of Lima and Peru read "Part 1: The Good".

Terrorism

Gunshots sound through the hallway. This is not just an individual gunshot from a handgun, no, but machinegun fire. I hear screaming, I hear chaos. I am on the second floor of a 5-star tourist hotel in Lima. Thoughts run through my mind like wildfire. The machinegun fire continues as I think, is this an extreme case of robbery, are they just after money, is this a politically motivated kidnapping, there are many Americans in this hotel, is this a political act of terrorism against US citizens, is this a case of hostage taking? These and many more thoughts shot through my head in less than a second. I cannot believe that this is just about money. The shooting is much too heavy, the screaming too loud. Pearls of sweat of fear start running down my back. My head is hot, my palms sweaty. What should I do? My thoughts continue to race. Where to hide? Under the bed? In the bathroom? I jump up and hide behind the curtain at the window. The curtain has the length of the whole wall and is completely closed as it is early in the morning. Only now standing behind the curtain do I realize I wear nothing. The gunshots woke me up and I had spent the night in bed wearing nothing. My thoughts didn't get any further because the door was opened with force and I hear the bullets hit the wall. Luckily there were walls left and right from the door leading to the bedroom and these walls, in my imagination, absorbed the bullets. I had my eyes closed, hands in my face, praying that I would somehow through a miracle survive. Then the gunfire stopped, I don't know what happened, I can only imagine. In my mind, I thought a person to be in the room, looking around, seeing things empty, turning around and leaving again. I thought to hear the person leave, but I was so frightened I didn't know for sure what I was hearing. I couldn't move anyway. I was frozen like a rock.

My mind slowly started thinking again. Clearly it wasn't about money. Nobody had searched my room. They were looking for people. I was still standing naked behind the curtain. At least I could remove my hands from my face and open my eyes again. I don't know how many minutes have passed since the person or persons stormed my room and sent bullets flying around. Maybe 3, maybe 15. I have lost my sense for time. I was thinking about how to get out of the hotel. I was in the second floor, jumping wasn't easy and who knows maybe there are gunmen outside the hotel as well.

Could I call someone? This was my first night in this hotel. To be precise this was my first night in South America. I had arrived here only yesterday shortly after midnight after an 18-hour flight with 2 stop-overs from Europe. On the plane I could already feel that I had fever and when I arrived I just dropped everything and fell into bed. I was new to Lima and knew nothing. I had no idea what the phone number of the police is. I knew not a single phone number in Peru. This did not seem like a good idea to start searching in the phone book for an emergency phone number.

I was still frightened to death. At this moment I woke up. Yes, I woke up to realize that in my feverish state I had a bad nightmare. I was lying in a pool of sweat. The whole bed sheet and the pillow were wet, soaked in sweat. My heart was pounding and I realized that nearly everything I dreamed was real. It was my first night in a 5-star hotel in Lima, I did get off an 18-hour flight with fever, there is a curtain covering the full wall to the outside. Everything was real, except the terrorists and the machinegun fire. In my fever my imagination went a bit too wild in my dreams. This was not one of those nightmares that you forget in a few hours. I was shaking and my heart was racing out of control.

Better a terrible nightmare than a terrible real thing. What a start to my stay in Lima. The reality was pretty sad too. My fever didn't get better and I had to resort to antibiotics. For the complete first week I didn't leave the hotel room. What a sad thing. Here I arrive excited in a new country, looking forward to the new sights and sounds of a South American metropolis, and for 1 week I see nothing but the same 4 walls of my hotel room and the waiter 3 times a day who delivers the room service.

All this is now a long time ago. I had first arrived in Lima mid-January. Now it is mid-July, exactly 6 months later. In 6 months I had not written a single trip report about Lima or Peru. That by itself is a pretty good indicator that I was never bored in the last half year. By now I have a pretty good feel for Lima, its places and its people.

I am not sure why I had this nightmare. Maybe I read too much about the terrorist acts in the past, the Shining Path, etc. The last terrorist act, however, was a long time ago, when the Japanese Embassy was turned into a hostage situation. I am not sure but that must have been 8 years ago or so. Today I feel very safe in Lima. People do tell me that certain areas are dangerous, but so far I haven't really seen any hard crime or seriously dangerous places. I feel very safe and people here, due to past experiences, are very careful. From time to time rumors go around. One of them is that taxi drivers, instead of bringing you to work, kidnap you and request payment from your family. A relatively small amount of a few thousand dollars. So, not only super rich people are kidnapped but also average people, with average jobs. The other story is that people drug you to mug you later when you are unconscious. While both things definitely do occur I cannot say if this is a serious problem or just a random individual incident. Anyway, so far I personally only had good experiences. Knock on wood.

The worst things that I have seen happen was that a thief followed us in the market in Huaraz. Another time, a professional pickpocket stole the wallet of my friend while we were all sitting at a fast-food restaurant having lunch. Sad, but at least no bodily harm. A friend of a friend had left a bar at 4 a.m. and then while on the street got beaten up by other people that were drunk. This was not a robbery. The drunken people just needed to get rid of some aggression and apparently the friend of my friend was at the wrong place at the wrong time. His eye was swollen and red and he had two cuts, one above and one below his eye.

Security

Security is high though. Security is visible, everywhere. It is impossible not to see it and be reminded daily. Every bank is guarded with military-looking guys toting machine guns. They are all part of private security service, which is big business here. They all look the same, no matter from what company they are. They wear black boots, green or camouflage uniform, a bulletproof vest and hold a machine gun. The police have similar looking people and at some cases I am sure I could not distinguish them. That they stand in front of banks is not so unusual, but they also stand in front of regular supermarkets, plain office buildings, malls, pharmacies, and plain company entrances. Well, they seem to be every few hundred meters. In some districts, like the business districts it is impossible to walk a block without seeing a couple of them. On the one hand they make you feel secure, on the other hand you wonder why they are there. In front of government buildings, embassies, etc. are more forces, more precisely, armed vehicles and small tanks and a strict no-parking-zone.

Factories and boring industrial buildings like cement factories have watchtowers and are encircled completely by walls. This is not the exception, this is the rule. The watchtowers are however with some rare exceptions unused, unmanned. Maybe they are just left-overs, remainders, from some past era.

If you are a private home-owner, life and architecture is not much different. It starts with fences, broken glass on top of the encircling wall, barbed wire, electric fences, and depending on your income ends with watchtower for the private security person. Or at least there will be, if you are rich, a mirrored black glass window behind which there is or is not a watchman or watchyman, as they are called here.

You get quickly used to it. While in the beginning the security guards and the barbed wire cause you to think for a split second, after a few weeks they will not even register anymore in your subconscious.

For the most part I think this is just a left-over from a chapter in Peru's strive for progress that has been closed. A reminder, nothing more. As I said, I always and everywhere felt very safe. Knock on wood.

One day was a strike of the cab driver. I am not sure, maybe of the bus drivers too. It was announces in leaflets. I was worrying how I would get to work the next day. I know what it is like when the tube employees strike in London. When I was on the street, early in the morning before 6 a.m. on my way to jogging, I didn't have a problem to flag a cab. On some strategic street corners I saw some military trucks parked and one of these police vehicles with a water-canon on top, but everything was calm. Later that day I took 3 more cabs, every time without problems. The cab drivers explained to me that he has to work, that the competition is hard, and that he needs the money. It was a day like any and could actually not observe any difference. A Peruvian friend, however, told me that occasionally these strikes end in cars set on fire. Not so today. Calm.

Another time ambulantes, the people that sell everything from cookies, newspaper to ice-cream on the street, had a rough time with the police. I don't know the background, but the police wanted to clear a street from ambulantes in the La Independencia or La Victoria district. Things got out of hand and ended in a riot with burning cars and a messy street. Again, I have felt and seen nothing, I just saw it on the cover page of the newspaper the next day. I felt 1000 miles away though.

Besides man-made problems Peru is also a very active seismic zone. The day before Christmas, before my arrival, was an earthquake. Another tremor shook Lima Easter Sunday. This quake was actually epicentered many miles south of Lima. I just thought it was funny that at all main religious feasts there is an earthquake. The biggest one was on May 5. It measured 5.5 on Richter scale. 15 seconds long, longer than most quakes I experienced in California. I was on the fifth floor in the office at night when it happened. It was strong, I was a bit scared and was standing under the nearest doorframe to my desk. Things were definitely moving. In August we had another one. Also about 5 and it could even be measured in the U.S.

Sights and Sounds

Lima has many typical sights. We used to sit around and joke about the many sights and sounds of Lima. The Chicklets (chewing-gum) sellers make the chah-cha sound with their cardboard boxes with the hard sugar-coated chewing gum, the D'Onofrio ice-cream vendors honk their toots to announce the ice-cream cart, the bus hustler yelling the street names promoting their routes. The taxis honk every time they drive by you because you are a potential customer and they want to get your attention. Sounds everywhere. Lima is full of attention-grabbing sounds, full of noise too. The sound and the noise never stop and are omnipresent.

Sights and sounds are not all. Lima has smells too. For the most part the smells are not to my liking. Smells in Lima nearly always means smog, exhaust fumes. At the ocean, on the beaches the smells capture the salty air, the typical smells of the sea, but everywhere else in this gigantic city the black clouds streaming from the exhaust pipes overwhelm everything. It is really bad, because it is impossible to escape it.

Traffic, Cars and Taxis

The traffic during the day is bad, about everywhere. At nights the streets are empty, but at the usual 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. hours the traffic piles up in the surface roads of Lima. Lima has no means of public mass transport, no subway, no tramway, just buses. A few years ago an attempt was made to build an elevated subway. An elevated track was created along Avenida Aviacion, but then the funding run dry. So even today, many years later, the only thing that relates to mass transport are lonely concrete columns along the avenue. Rumors have it that millions of dollars of the cost of these columns ended up in the wallets of the politicians ordering the construction.

Despite that 8 million people, a third of Peru's population, crowd Lima, there is only 1 freeway. Via Expresa, also called The Ditch, because in order to avoid intersections and the cost of building an elevated platform they dug a ditch, and Via Expresa is now a bit below regular street-level.

The many cars that populate the city are of the strangest makes and models. It is possible the find the weirdest creations here. You can find pretty much any car ever produced anywhere in the world here. Cars from the former eastern block, cars from the U.S., cars from Europe and Asia with Japanese instructions on them. Cars from all decades, from the 60s to the 90s. From prehistoric trucks to Ferrarris. What was astonishing for me is the percentage of Korean cars. I don't know of a country, except Korea, in which there is a higher percentage of Korean cars. From Daewoos, Hyndais, to Kias. The car that seems to shape the image of the traffic in Lima is the Tico. It's the landmark of Lima's traffic, a small, maybe the smallest car. Korean made, fits 5 passengers or more depending how many you want to squeeze in.

From all these cars nearly every fourth is a cab. Cabs are not or hardly regulated in Peru. Turning your car into a cab requires little, a "taxi" sticker on the windshield and a little red light inside the car to identify the car as a cab at night. Putting 7 people in a cab is a common thing. Since cabs are everywhere and cheap it makes little sense for a visiting foreigner to rent a car for Lima. You normally don't need to look for a cab, the cab drivers will look for you. They honk at you while driving and at busy intersections park their car and ask you if you want a ride while you stroll down the sidewalk. With zillions of streets the cab drivers of course know only the important ones and the landmark of the cities. If you are looking for a certain address, a certain unknown restaurant or an office building, you better know where it is as the cab driver will not know where it is. You tell the cab driver the nearest landmark. He will then drive you there and you better know yourself how to get from the landmark to your address.

I was once looking for the home of a friend, I just had the address and I was never there before. The cab driver of course didn't know where it is. I didn't have exact change and neither did the cab driver, so I gave the cab driver a large bill for changing at some street corner. We then did a loop to look for the street, without success. Some of the streets where tiny and just walkways, so I got out to look at the street names. While out of the cab looking at the street names the cab driver drove off, with my money of course. I was stranded in a neighborhood I didn't know at 6 a.m. I managed to find a hotel with a phone book and the yellow pages contain a street map, so eventually I was able to figure out where I was and where I needed to be.

Another interesting taxi experience was in Tarma. We arrived at 5 a.m. in the morning with a bus, it was freezing cold, maybe below freezing point. We took a cab from the bus station to a home in the center of town. We were 5 people and the cab driver had his wife with him, so 7 in total. We loaded all the luggage into the trunk, then his wife lay down on the luggage and held the trunk door shut, while we 5 went inside the cab as passengers. The distance from the bus station to the house was only 10 minutes, but the cab had to stop once in some dark street to open the hood and fiddle with the engine. I don't know what the problem was but apparently the car wasn't fit for such a long journey of 10 minutes.

The Workplace

Corporate life is different too from many other places. While some corporations provide a working environment similar to that in the U.S. or Europe, other large employers lack a few items. Very quickly have I observed that the toilet paper is missing in the toilets. This is not because it has not been refilled, but because it will never be refilled. If toilet paper were to be placed in the toilets it disappears miraculously. The company has learned this lesson very quickly and therefore simply doesn't paper in the toilets. If there is none there it cannot disappear. Use of toilet follows the BYOP principle, bring your own paper.

Another item that is missing is the telephone. There is one telephone for every 5 desks. And the telephone only allows you to make calls in the city you are in. The employer doesn't want you to make or receive calls. Yes, you have the option to go to the secretary one floor up. You can wait for her, chase her down, and once found, you put your first name, last name, and phone number in a book, sign it and give a business reason. Then you need to know the number of the phone somewhere near your desk, because you will not have a phone on your desk. With that information she will connect the call for you. You of course must run downstairs and wait next to the phone now. Not a very efficient process, just image you want to make 10 calls a day. With 10 calls per hour you will do a lot of exercise going up and down the stairs and locating the secretary. I found it a lot easier to leave the office, walk to the nearest street corner, wait there in line until the only working phone in the phone booth became available and to place my call there. There were 4 phones, but from the 4 phones one would not accept my calling card, one didn't work at all, one worked but the volume of the phone was so low that I never could understand the person on the other end. Now you might think that having a phone on your desk is a luxury and that my expectations are too high. I should add, that this was the office of the largest telecom operator in the country. If I had thought that there is a company that has a phone at every desk I would have thought it is this company. But I was wrong. Other companies supposedly are a lot better in that respect.

Business

Business is booming in some areas. Lima has many large banks and many more are building gigantic 20-storey skyscrapers. Other parts are not doing so well. Some shopping malls have various stores for rent. Worse, the Peruvian government-owned airline, Aero Peru, filed bankruptcy while I was there.

The Police

Cops are also a special breed of people. With their low salaries they are ripe for bribes. They take advantage of the various ways to improve their income. The pricing scheme is also quite flexible. The basic rule is of course, the more you have the more you pay. As a foreigner you always have the pleasure of paying ten times what the locals pay. All in all we had three encounters with traffic cops. The first time was the worst. On the Panamericana in a southern suburb of Lima we crossed a side street despite the fact that the traffic light was red. There was no traffic, we had stopped and then we had continued, like many Peruvians do. It is not an unusual thing to cross a red light late a night if there is no traffic. You see it every day. But this time a cop wanted to improve his salary. It was incredible. He told some story about having to take of the license plate and us not having the permission to continue. We talked back and forth. Eventually he wanted something like $200. A fortune, most like his monthly salary. Anyway, we paid the bribe to get it over with. But it was way too much. We were inexperienced.

The second time we got the attention of the police was when we made a rather brisk U-turn in Lima during daytime when there was a lot of traffic. The cop this time only explained to us that it was dangerous, and the warning was the end of our discussion. No money needed to change hands.

The third encounter was again on the Panamericana. We were going 100 m.p.h. about the top speed the rental car would do over long stretches. We got stopped for speeding. I am not sure if they have radar. In any case we started arguing about the speed and that we only went 75 m.p.h. which we thought is the speed limit. Of course then we were told that the speed limit at night is only 50 m.p.h. Time to start negotiating the bribe. This time we were smarter and started the negotiation with $10. After a little bit of haggling we ended up with $30. Evolution in Peru, you learn with experience. We had graduated from the course Bribe 101, How much to offer when you are being caught.

The Good

Now you might feel that Peru is not such a nice place to visit. Read "Part 1: The Good" of this trilogy and think again. Peru is a nice place. You just need to know what things you should avoid.

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