Travel to Peru and Friday April 4 - Lima and Pachacamac

We had excellent flights to Peru.  When I booked the flights, many months ago, I was concerned about delays in getting to Newark, so I booked a 6:00 a.m. departure.  This meant we had about seven hours in Newark until the 2:15 p.m. flight to Lima.  My eagle eyed wife saw that the Business/First class tickets were very reasonably priced.  Usually, it costs 400% or more for Business/First over the cost of coach - but it was only about 150% the cost of coach - so we went with that.  Our flight to Newark was in First Class and our flight to Lima was in Business Class with lay flat seats.  This was the first time I have flown like this.  The food and drink was excellent, served on cloth placemats with real china and silverware.  Each seat was a pod that had headphones, power outlets for your cell phone and laptop, and private console for entertainment.  Kaye Hooker, the woman who is leading our team, was on the same flight with us.  We all enjoyed the flight.

Kaye was in the row just in front of Patty and me

Immigration and customs were quick and easy.  Zenon Colque, the local Fuller Center director, met us at the airport and we were at our hotel in less than an hour after landing.  Hotel Santa Maria is a basic, relatively quiet hotel on Ave. La Marina in the San Miguel section of Lima:

http://www.jianhoteles.com.pe/sanmiguel.html

Saturday morning, we had the breakfast included with the hotel room rate: coffee, pineapple juice and rolls with butter and jam.  Zenon joined us around 8:30 for coffee.  After he left for his office (he owns and runs some factories), we went for a walk to the local Starbucks that we had seen on the drive to the hotel.  Along the way, I stopped at an ATM and got some Peruvian Soles.

Outside Starbucks, there were these waist high lantana

We passed this nice park on the way to Starbucks

This is for my son Ben, who does Ironman Triathalons

We then met up with Zenon, and he took us to his office.  He drove us south to Pachacamac Ruins, a national park were they are preserving these ancient Inca ruins of a large religious center for the Incans.  I have since found that commercial tours would have cost each of us three more than $100 each: http://www.peru-explorer.com/pachacamac.htm.  Instead, we paid the 10 PS entry fee (one U.S. dollar equals 2.7 Peruvian Soles, so a little more than $3.50) and later bought Zenon and Monica (she is another Fuller staff person and is a homeowner from La Florida) dinner and drinks, and later pisco sours for less than 100 PS per person - still much less than the commercial tours.

The ride took us along a highway that was close to the ocean, where we saw many beautiful beaches and million dollar homes on cliffs on the other side of the highway.  I was sitting in the rear left, so I could not get photos of the beautiful beaches, but I did get a few shots of the cliffs on my side.

The Pachacamac ruins are in the Atacama Desert, believed to be in the driest part of the earth.  I was told they have had no rain for many years, but because of El Nino they are expecting some rain this year.  We really did see that we were in a desert, but there were areas of lush green in the desert.

There interesting cacti and succulents, as well as llamas and alpacas at Pachacamac.

We went through the museum and then spent a couple of hours walking around the ruins - we covered less than a quarter of the areas open to the public.

In spite of being in the middle of a desert, the Incas built this massive temple.  It is still an active archeological dig site, so in some places they are continuing to uncover more remains and in some places they have replaced some of the original parts of the temple so that you can see what it would have looked at.  The walls were primarily adobe which over time disintegrates.

Even though we were in the desert, there was lush greenery around us due to the system of canals.

I will post more later, have to go now to lunch and La Florida.