Back in the Peru Groove

A giant vase in the Parque John F, Kennedy (or is it Parque 7 de Junio?) in Miraflores

An ancient philosopher once said, "The only constant in life is change." I googled the quote and found out it was Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who I would not have known but for googling his quote. But I've known his quote far longer than I knew who said it. And that's as good a lead-in as any to explain why I'm back in Peru groove after only having been here two months ago.

That is the Parroquia La Virgen Milagrosa church right on the walkway that divides Parque John F. Kennedy from Parque 7 de Junio, which otherwise would generally seem to be one park. But they're not. I walked through these conjoined parks en route to the day's tourist destination in the upscale Miraflores neighborhood of Lima.

Anyway, I liked but didn't love Lima the first time I visited here in 2018. I re-visited in Spring 2024 (Peru's fall) and still felt the same: like not love. Then I came back in December 2025. I don't know how much of it was that Lima has changed (and it had) or that I've changed (can't help it) (time is marching onward not matter what I want to do to slow things down), but I now love this city. The food has always been great, here. But now, the city seems like it is not as poor. Crime seems to be down. (I'll probably get hit over the head with a lead pipe tomorrow to prove the naivete of that statement.) People seem more relaxed and friendly (and they were very friendly before). And some other places that I used to like (Colombia, which would include Bogotá, which I used to love) have moved in the opposite direction.

Cool-looking tree in Parque 7 de Junio. So I took its portrait.

Places don't stay the same forever. Nothing does. None of us do. So why should cities in countries? Which is my way of saying that things have moved sufficiently so my like of Lima, Peru, has blossomed into love.

Just a big colorful blue bull in Parque 7 de Junio. So I'm back enjoying this city another time because there is no guarantee that all of things that make Lima wonderful right now will last forever and, even if they did, there's no guarantee that I will be in a position to keep traveling here to enjoy them. So that's my justification for two trips in two months. That and some Delta Airlines credit that was "use or lose."

I'm not let-lagged per se, since Lima is in the same time zone as East Coast USA. But yesterday was exhausting, with getting up at 3:00 a.m. to be at the airport by 4:00 a.m. for a flight at 6:00 a.m. So it was an Eagles day: "take it easy". No letting the sounds of my own wheels drive me crazy. "Lighten up while you still can" definitely was the order of the day.

The day's tourism target was Huaca Pucllana. This is a giant pyramid that it about a millennium and a half years old and, for a long time, locals just thought it was a weird-shaped hill. Then, in the 1970s, someone figured out, "Hey! There's a pyramid under here." And the rest is pre-hispanic American history.

I visited here back in 2018. It's still an active archaeological site. So I decided to return to see if more of the pyramid structure had been, literally, unearthed.

The pyramid and archaeological complex are several acres in an otherwise upscale suburban neighborhood of Lima, Miraflores. Apparently the Lima civilization who built this were sufficiently wealthy to be able to afford such immense acreage in a wealthy suburb.

And here I am. At the entrance to Sitio Pucllana.

This is not a "pyramid" in the Great Pyramids of Giza sense, or even the Mayan step pyramids of Mayan culture. It's a large tiered building that slopes inward as the walls get higher. That's good enough to earn the pyramid moniker.

And even if it is not a pyramid per se, in the mathematical sense, it is impressive architecture.

You can only walk around the grounds as part of a guided tour. Probably because tourists do stupid things. Like climb on steep, fragile 1500 walls in search of the perfect instagram photo. I wouldn't. But "other" tourists would. (I'm being truthful. Walking on the side of a steep cliff is not my idea of fun time. Even if it is only high enough that you would left with a broken neck or broken back -- and not instant death -- from the fall. Correct that: especially since I would be left with a broken neck or broken back and not instant death.)

I had 35 minutes or so until the next English language tour, which was more than enough time to tour the small museum:

Replica pottery.

The Lima people were not the bon vivants that were the Moche people who lived contemporaneously (A.D. 500 to 700), but farther up the Pacific coast. The Moche are known to all of us who still have a giggling middle school boy inside us as the ones who mastered the art of pr0n-o-graphic pottery. The Lima people kept their pottery G-rated and functional. Usually with sharks on them. The Lima people loved the sharks.
 

We will get to that viewing platform once the tour has started.

This is a lucuma tree.

What is lucuma? It's a fruit tree indigenous to the Andes. The Lucuma is a particularly delicious ice cream flavor in South America. I do not know if the Lima people of a millennium and a half ago made lucuma ice cream. I doubt it. Ice cream was probably more of an Inca thing. (But they probably would have made it from llama milk since they the New World was cow-free at the time.)

There is a small garden on the north side of the property growing plants that the Lima people would have consumed (when they were not eating shark) (they ate a lot of shark) (worshipped shark, too) (so they definitely were not believers in the idea of "don't eat what you worship").

You may recognize these little critters as the famous "cuy."

You call them "guinea pigs." We call it "cuy." (The allusion there to the corn/maize TV commercials for indigenous-friendly margarine in the 1970s is probably lost on everybody but me.) I don't believe these cuy are destined for the dinner table. At least that's what they tell us tourists. The truth may be more complicated.

And here are a few alpaca.

No llamas these. Alpacas have better quality wool for clothing making. (Llama hair is itchy against our skin.)  (It also stinks when it gets wet.)

So we reward alpacas for having better wool by shaving them bald and then grilling them up for steaks. Alpaca is supposed to be tasty. Llama meat -- since we on a roll dissing the llama right now -- is supposed to be nasty, tasting like an llama wool blanket left out in a rainstorm.

This alpaca is not sleeping. I apologize for not having the video turned on, but right after I snapped this, the alpaca starting rolling around on his back like a dog who just discovered a big pile of stink. Good times in tourist town.

Time to climb the pyramid.

The spacing in the bricks, which the guide called "bookshelving," makes the structure earthquake-resistant. And this is earthquake country.

And here's the view from the top. Which makes it clear that this 1500-year-old structure (approximately) is just in city blocks.

Because we are on a guided tour, we tourists are well-behaved.

Again, if we had been left to our tourist devices, you know that several of us would be climbing on those archaeologically-significant bricks.

Funeral site:

 

There probably was a mummy in there when this was discovered. Ancient Peruvian cultures mummified their dead. It's a desert thing.

This is a view of Maria Reina church, not far from Pucllana.

It's from a later era.

And the tour ended at the part of the archaeological dig that was the also was the end of the excavated pyramid when I visited eight years ago. There has been no visible archaeological progress in that time.

Is it money? Is it preservation, given that enough has now been unearthed to know what the entire structure looked like without excavating the entire structure? Is the activity now taking place outside of what you can see? Or is it just slow laborious work?

Here I am, looking like a man who didn't get much sleep the day before.

But that look got me the senior discount for admission to the site. I'll take it! I will take any senior discount offered without mixed emotions because a discount is better than paying full price.

Having eaten a big breakfast at the hotel, and having skipped lunch, it soon was time for a big supper. I chose the Punto Azul, a local chain that the hotel bartender said had great seafood. Peru has one of the world's greatest fishing grounds just off its coast, so the quality of seafood is excellent. And the best seafood in Lima is supposed to be found in the Miraflores neighborhood, which is where I happened to be.

I ordered an appetizer, since I did not know how big the portions would be. These are fish wontons. They have some other Spanish sounding name. But they're fish wontons.

The main course was Arroz Punto Azul. The bartender had recommended the Arroz con Mariscos, rice with seafood, but the Arroz Punto Azul sounded more interesting.

The Arroz Punto Azul was described in the English-language gringo-friendly menu as "coriander rice," which I correctly presumed would be rice gussied up with the herb coriander, "with creamy calamari, shrimp and octopus sauce," again correctly presuming that the calamari, shrimp and octopus -- all sea creatures I enjoy ingesting --  were part of the meal and not simply disappeared into sauce. The Arroz Punto Azul was gigante. I should have eschewed the appetizer course. I kept eating my Arroz Punto Azul and the giant heap would not get any smaller.

All in all, not bad at all for a chain restaurant (albeit local chain) in a wealthy suburb filled with gringo tourist loudly talking gringo tourist talk.

Last Day of Perusing Peru

A man and his camelid. Which, in Peru, usually means a llama or an alpaca.

As I drift deeper and deeper into my dotage, travel has become less and less about seeing sights. It's more about soaking in the atmosphere of a place and learning more about the place's history and its current state. Today was the day to soak in Lima on the last weekend before Christmas 2025.

Yesterday I headed north from my hotel. Today I head south. Where there are museums aplenty.

Such as this. El Museo de Arte Italiano. The Museum of Italian Art.

Lets look at the big murals on either side of the entrance.

This, however, was not among the museums I intend to visit. I don't want to sound like an art snob here, but one does not travel to Lima to see the major works from major Italian artists. And I have a limit of two museums per day. The Italian Art did not make the cut.

So let's keep on walking.

This is the Fuente de Neptuno, the Fountain of Neptune, in Parque Juana Alarco de Dammert. I do not know who Señora Alarco de Dammert. And I don't why she has a Neptune in her park.

She also has a former president of Peru in her parque, too.

Meet Don Manuel Candamo.

Her park is right on the other side of Avenida Paseo de la República from the Monumento a Miguel Grau.

I have finally learned that Señor Grau's monument is not accessible to pedestrians. It is on a traffic island between two extremely crowded of the divided Avenida Paseo de la República. Even if you were to survive crossing all the lanes of crowded traffic, you would have to navigate over the barriers blocking pedestrian access to Señor Grau's monument on Señor Grau's traffic island, which is called Plaza Miguel Grau even though you cannot access it.

And speaking of things I learned, if you remember, I have been looking unsuccessfully for ceviche in Lima. Well I found it:

I found it and I won't eat it. A ceviche cart. Given that ceviche is raw fish "cooked" in an acid bath of lime juice, I want my ceviche fish to have been stored at refrigerator temperatures. I don't trust a street cart to maintain proper fish cooling temperatures. You know how they say never to get sushi from a gas station? I would add: never order ceviche from a street cart. Churros, yes. Especially in Lima. Ceviche?  That would be a hard pass.

And once again we run into Christopher Columbus. 

Finally, after a grueling walk of around 550 kilometers, which is nearly the length of five football fields back to back to back to back to back, I arrived at my intended museum destination.

MALI. Not the country in Africa with Timbuktu in it. That would requiring walking much more than 550 km, including walking over open ocean for a significant part of the walk. The MALI is an acronym for Museum of Art of LIma.

From the second floor of the MALI, I could see the Pabellón Bizantino, the Byzantine Pavilion.

I could get no closer because it's behind massive barricades. A large section of the park is walled off, and an admission fee is being charged. I am guessing it is some large celebratory gathering related to this being the last weekend before Christmas. There's a lot of that going around in Lima. This is a town that takes its Christmas seriously, albeit with a massive amount of fun.

Let's tour the museum collection, shall we?

You walk through the collection of Peruvian art in chronological order. This means you start with pottery and, more specifically, the pottery of the pre-Incan cultures in the land that is modern-era Peru.

There are two things about this collection that absolutely defies how I ordinarily view art museums.

That is a hairless dog. The Peruvian hairless dog is a recognized breed of dog.  This, however, looks more like a Chihuahua. Or maybe one of those hideously ugly Chinese Crested hairless dogs which are the size of chihuahuas, but hideous. And the owners dress them up in pajamas because that's what you do when you have a hideously ugly hairless dog.

Anyway, when I go to an art museum and they display handicrafts from ancient cultures, or any less "sophisticated" cultures, I always think it is grossly condescending to equate a woven basket from some indigenous tribe with a painting from the Italian Renaissance or French impressionism. They are not equivalent. Here, the pre-Inca pottery is the star of the museum show. And deservedly so.

I mean, c'mon, just look at that cat. I have totally seen cats strike that pose in my lifetime. It's not shock they were doing that 1300 years ago or whatever.

The thing about the pre-Incan pottery on display here is that these are not handicrafts. These are not the equivalent of the "everyday china" that was unearthed at an archaeological site and declared to be fine art. This is art.

As are these.

There also are pre-Inca textiles on display.

And, of course, we have the obligatory wall of pottery.

Every museum with pre-Inca pottery always has at least one wall of pottery. The MALI is not exception.

Here is an interesting piece. The design is not abstract.

It's a series of interlocking snakes and fish. We know who is going to win that battle.

What this staged to look like one of those Darwinian Descent of Man representations?

We move out of the "pre-hispanic" era and into the "post-hispanic." This is an interesting work from the late 1700's

 

Procesión de Corpus Christi en el Cusco. Corpus Christi procession in Cusco, attributed to an anonymous Cusqueño/

This one I found to be very disturbing:

Trinidad trifacial. The three-faced trinity. I don't think I've seen any prior representations of the Holy Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost as three faces on one body. Bring back to the cat and dog pottery, please, I say.

We then enter the gold room:

The display tried to indicate that gold was not valued by the indigenous people of Peru, pre-Pizarro and, instead, they valued spondylus shells more. Bullship, I declare. Bullship. We now for certain that the Inca valued gold more than seashells. That's why there was so much gold in Cusco to ship back to Spain. And so much gold in Moche culture. And Mayan culture. Yes, they may have liked the seashells, too. Some indigenous people valued particular feathers. But everybody everywhere has always loved the uncorruptible allure of gold. This was not a Spanish or even a European obsession. It was a global obsession.

This is the Funerales de Santa Rosa. The Funeral of St. Rose.

It is by Peruvian impressionist artist Teófilo Castillo, He completed it in 1918 a few years before his death. Given the popularity of Peruvian Saint Rose de Lima, of course her funeral would have been worth memorializing in a work of art. The use of the impressionist style is a worthy choice.

We now move into the "modern art" section.

And it's not all crap-tasmic, as I was expecting. This is "Portable Alter," a take on the the medieval era alter pieces that one design on the exterior and a different one in the interior to be opened on special occasions. It's by Peruvian artist Joaquín López Antay, It was completed in the 1970s or early 1980s.

I'm not sure why this was in with the "modern" era.

And then we get to something I should hated and didn't: Psicoanálisis del Lanzón de Chavín. The psychoanalysis of the Lanzón de Chavín by the artist Fernando Gutiérrez "Huanchaco." I've stopped labelling the artists now as "Peruvian artists" because all of the artists in this museum are Peruvian artists.

This is labelled an "installation." Normally, calling something an art installation is telling me I am going to hate it. But I don't hate this. It's inventive, clever and respectful of history while having a bit of fun with that history.

This is a recreation of an ancient artifact, the Lanzón de Chavín, a stela from the Chavín culture, which flourished from 900 to 200 B.C. It is an upright stela, but here it appears to be draped over a psychoanalyst's couch, with a loudspeaker blaring. Apparently, the Lanzón de Chavín is exhausted and "burned out" from all the years of being an important national symbol. It works. So I learned something today. Not all modern art sucks.

It's from this decade, which means we've reached the chronological end of the MALI tour. Time to find the next museum. And time to find what is going on in the space next door.

This is the Pabellon Morisco. Don't know much else about it other than it looks great and is behind chainlink fencing.

This is the Monumento a Ricardo Palma.

Ricardo Palma is an important figure in Peruvian literature. Which is why his monument is near an important national library. And that important national library is next to (or contained within) the next museum I intended to visit: El Museo Metropolitano de Lima, the Metropolitan Museum of Lima.

It seemed to be closed.

Why do I say that? In front of the entrance was a small house for children to talk to Santa Claus. And I wasn't about to elbow my way past Santa with a "get out of my way, Old Man, I got museum-ing to do.:

So, because of all of the various activities in Parque de la Exposición, I only could walk the perimeter.

It is, as we know, Christmas in Lima. The city is put on its Christmas finery. The police motorcycles are done up as reindeer (more or less). They are guarded by the Grinch because why not? Since it's still before Christmas Day, the Grinch's heart still would be two sizes too small. Which makes him perfect for police work. I kid. I kid.

There was a tourist train parked in the parking lot.

And the nativity scene had a very wide variety of animals in attendance.

And with that, my Lima and Peru tourism has come to an end. I never made it the Circuito Mágico del Agua, the incredible light and water show another half of a mile to the south because, with the Christmas crowds, it promised to be an absolute zoo there. Next time. And there will be a next time, if life continues down this path.