Yesterday I said good-bye to Iquitos, but not before managing to get a picture of the lovely traffic I had been dealing with for the last several days. Those three-wheeled motorcycles are called 'motokars', and they're what serves as taxis in Iquitos. It seems like half of the population makes a living by driving the other half around. And in case you're wondering, the lines on the road are just for decoration. They don't correspond to any sort of order when it comes to driving. So when you combine a bunch of motokars and motorcycles and a few random cars, you'd pretty much have to have a death wish to drive in Iquitos.
I landed in Lima around 8 pm last night, and made it to my hotel a bit before 10 (between baggage claim and the taxi ride, that's pretty much how long it took). Anyway, I'm on the twentieth floor, with a great view of Miraflores (the touristy district in Lima) from my window.
Anyone who's been to Europe will appreciate this. Many European countries have decorated animal statues around town for one reason or another. Well, in Lima, they have cows. I have several pictures that'll make it to Facebook sooner or later, but here's one of them.
I spent my morning doing some souvenir shopping in the Indian Market, where I confirmed my horrible haggling skills, and then spent the afternoon in Larcomer, which is essentially a mall in Miraflores. There's also a gold museum in Larcomer (Oro del Peru), which has some pretty interesting stuff about the history of Peru and gold and silver artifacts. Here's a map of what the first Spanish explorers thought Latin America looked like.
A popular activity in Miraflores seems to be hang-gliding. Looks like fun, if you ask me, but here's a picture from Larcomer at sunset of some of the hang-gliders over the ocean.
2 comments:
What a nice pic of the hang gliders and the sunset! Desktop or framable quality.
Thanks! I was really proud of that picture, especially since it was taken on my five-year-old point-and-shoot.
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