South America and Antarctica

We had a lovely day today exploring Lima. We started with a very nice breakfast in the hotel, before heading out for the day’s activities.

Our first stop was the Mario Testino Museum (MATE), where we had arranged to meet our new friends, Simon and Mags (who live just outside of Oxford). We met Simon and Mags in Machu Picchu and travelled back with them on the train from Machu Picchu to Poroy. We saw them briefly again in Cusco and then met up with them again today in Lima. And we have already arranged to visit them in England when we are there in January!

The museum was wonderful. It houses a permanent collection of photographic work by Mario Testino in a restored 19th Century mansion, located in the trendy area of Barranco. After touring the museum, we sat outside and chatted for a while before Simon and Mags had to head back to their hotel to collect their luggage before they joined a cruise to Santiago.

We didn’t get far from the museum (about 150m!) before we made our next stop, at Central Restaurante. This restaurant is the flagship restaurant of Peruvian chef, Virgilio Martínez Véliz. It is considered one of the finest restaurants in the world and serves a degustation menu based on indigenous ingredients from Peru. Over two and a half hours, we ate an incredible selection of ingredients, including plenty of exotic things that we had not experienced before (such as Amazonian Lake Piranha!).

After lunch we ambled through the lovely area of Barranco.

We then hailed a cab to go to the Miraflores Boardwalk. Getting a cab was pretty easy but communicating with the driver was a bit tricky because he didn’t speak English and we don’t speak Spanish! We managed to type our destination into the GPS on his phone and all was resolved. Our main purpose for going to the Miraflores Boardwalk was to see the Paddington Bear statue. Michael Bond’s Paddington stowed away from “darkest Peru” to London and the statue was a gift from the British Embassy in Lima to the people of Lima. We got a few photos with Paddington and then wandered around the shops nearby for a little while before heading back to the hotel.

Back at the hotel we went to the pond out the front, where around 50 turtles are cared for by the hotel staff. The concierge told us that the exotic collection of turtles came about because residents in the area bought turtles as pets but found them a bit hard to care for as they got bigger (since most residents in the area live in high-rise apartments) so they started depositing them in the hotel’s pond! They are now quite a feature of the hotel and they live a very good life, well fed and well cared for.

When we left our room this morning we left our “Do not disturb” sign out because we had cranked up the heating to dry some clothes that we had washed the night before, all of which were still wet. We thought for sure that they would be dry when we got back but they were still very wet on our return. Conveniently, our room has a sauna so we cranked that up to about 70C and put everything in there to dry. Job done!

We were still very full from our huge lunch so we opted for room service for dinner: chicken soup, ice-cream, and a nice cup of local tea.

It’s nearly time for bed now. We’ve got to be up reasonably early in the morning to fight through the Lima traffic to get to the airport to fly to Foz do Iguaçu in Brazil, a flight of about four hours.