The last day of our trip to Peru. We checked into another AIRBnb Appartment in Miaflores, south of the city center in walking distance to the beach and to the Lacomar shopping center.
Denis, a colleague from IRRI who is working out of Peru, had invited us for lunch at the Lacomar center, and showed us some of the highlights of Miaflores afterwards.
Still recovering from the altitude sickness we experienced in Cusco we spent the afternoon resting in the apartment and sorting out flights back to LA or the Philippines for Martin for the next day. For dinner we went back to Lacomar and had some nice frozen yoghurt, and some of the tasty Peruvian beers.
For the next day we had planned to visit some museums about Inca and previous ancient cultures. The Museo de la Nacion got reallygood reviews in the 20 year old Lonely Planet Bas had donated to us. A quick check on TripAdvisor and other websites revealed that in the meantime most exhibitions were closed. So we cut the museum visit from out to do list. Don’t use 20 year old guide books.
Denis had given us some ideas during last day’s lunch on the previous day about what else to do. Among other things he suggested the old town of Lima with the catacombs and many historical buildings. We wanted to leave the apartment at 9:00. But all three of us were quite exhausted from the week at high altitude. So were finally ready to leave around 10:30. We took a taxi and went to the historical downtown Lima, to have sandwiches for breakfast and afterwards visit the Cathedral and the religious art museum inside and then the San Francisco Church where the catacombs are. The taxi dropped us at the “Plaza de Armas de Lima”, there is the Cathedral, the goverment palace at which the change of the guard was performed while we were there and many other old buildings from the Spanish times.
We enjoyed some nice sandwiches for breakfast (why don’t they have them in the Philippines?), we did a tour of the cathedral, which houses an impressive religious art museum.
Picture!!!
After watching the change of the guard for a while we then went around some government to the nearby San Francisco Church, which is famous for its catacombs tinyurl.com/ycbgtuej.
We had enough time left for an English language tour of the church and the catacombs, which took around an hour. It was a very strange, claustrophobic atmosphere down there with lots of underground halls and pathways, skulls and legbones. What was the idea behind that those catacombs are nice graves compared to a graveyard in the open and maybe on a mountain? No wonder people were so worried about the underworld.
Another taxi then brought us back to Miraflores, there was quite some traffic so we were delayed, and cancelled the museum visit planned for the afternoon. After final packing of our backpacks, another taxi picked us up at 6:00 for dinner at Yolanda‘s, Denises girlfriend.
What a nice way to wind up an exciting two week trip to Peru.