Lima
Lima is the capital of Peru. The city looks messy but modern, with dirty and wide avenues. Lima is flat and huge. There are 9 million people living in Lima, mostly on two story buildings. The city follow the coastline but it is the first city I’ve visited that instead of hugging the sea, it looks designed to give it the cold shoulder.
Lima, Plaza de Armas
Lima is a grey, functional city. The people look busy and only in the oldest part of downtown you can see some buildings with historic value, narrow streets and colonial style houses. My most interesting experiences in Lima are related to the traffic. Traffic in Lima is awful. Most of the cars are really old and are full of dents.
Public transportation is very interesting and have their particular name: “movilidad”. There is no subway or street cars. They don’t use the European concept of urban bus, but they have microbuses. Those microbuses are basically vans that move on a predeterminate route. There are two guys in each van, one of them is the driver. The other guy go out of the vehicle when there is a stop and start yelling to announce where the van is headed. Some microbus stops are clearly signed but frequently any red light is used as improvisated stop where you can get on or off the microbus.. even if it is on the middle of the road!.
Those vans have around 20 small seats but there are frequently full and the people stand straight. I’ve seen full of people vans with probably 30 people inside. The ticket for the micros are absurdly cheap.
The other half of “movilidad” concepts are cabs. They are a more expensive than the micros on long distances but the price on short distances is cheap and everybody can pay for them. Actually I guess 70% of vehicles in Peru are Taxis. The quality is… not good if we compare it with European standards. First, you need to stop the taxi and barter with the driver. There can be a huge difference between a taxi and another specially if they realize you are not from South America beause they will try to rip you off. And second, the cars are really old and dirty. Really dirty. And don’t expect the driver to wear a nice suit. Not expect even clean drivers.
Car = Cab on Lima
My best moments in Lima were in the cabs because it was a very good opportunity to speak with locals. Lima is a huge city and I needed a 40 minutes ride to downtown from the hotel (Paying like 1 EUR). Those people were honest, and they were clearly interested on having a foreigner Spanish speaker on board. I guess the drivers are not used to it because most of the tourists don’t bother taking taxis. It is something dangerous according to the travel guides.
About our conversations, the taxi drivers were street smart people. The general consensus is that everybody knows that the state corruption is abysmal but they accepted it. I will close the post with a cite I love from one of the Taxi Drivers because it shows clearly what I’m referring when I say they are street smart.
“We need intelligent people to lead us, and intelligent people are always smart to keep for themselves part of the wealth”.
