Circuitos Magicos del Agua

A busy Saturday night at the Circuitos Magicos del Agua

Lots happening on a Saturday night on the periphery of Lima's Centro Historico. There was a massive parade/demonstration in front of my hotel -- probably it was in front of the Palace of Judicial Power across the plaza from my hotel -- in celebration of Peruvian's Woman's Day 2026.

(I will say this about Peruvian women and their day and their demonstrating in this neighborhood. It was loud Thursday night. It was louder Friday night. And it was even louder Saturday night. But, by 10:00 p.m., a reasonable sleeping hour: dead silent. What a polite group of celebratory protestors! There is absolutely nothing wrong with being exuberantly loud in the evening when everything becomes "tranquilo" when it's time for the good people of Lima to go to sleep.)

The plan was to walk the mile south from my hotel to the Circuito Magico located in the Parque de la Reserva, just on the other side of the national stadium. I quickly got out of the hub-bub from the Peruvian national women's day celebration parade and started walked and, right when I got to the stadium, I hit an absolute impenetrable wall of humanity.

 

I was able to walk "behind" the stadium where things were much quieter. Well, "quieter" in the sense of "easier to walk." The noise inside the stadium was loud, with speakers and music. (I hit the same wall of humanity on the return walk, only it was not quite as impenetrable because events were still taking place inside. I guessed that it was a Christian event of some sort, given how many people were wearing T-shirts referencing "Jesus." I googled it and found out later that this was Esperanza Lima Festival, a two-day Christian outreach crusade headlined by Christian evangelist Franklin Graham. Which explains why this was the most polite impenetrable wall of humanity I have ever encountered.)

There was even a church service going on simulataneously at a small Catholic church in the shadow of the national stadium, La Parroquia Santa Teresita del Niño Jesús. We Catholics can be indifferent to massive crusades organized by evangelical Protestants.

After that little detour behind the stadium, I arrived at what I surmised was my intended destination.

A wall of humanity, but thankfully not impenetrable. For a mere five soles, about a buck fifty, I was in:

 

Circuito Magico del Agua.

I knew it was fountains lit up in various colors. I knew there was some sort of "show" thrice nightly. But I didn't know the full spectrum of what the place was.

It was an electric night-time carnival, open every night in Lima:

Rides for the kids, such as the well-lit carousel.

And an lit up train to travel the park grounds.

This carriage was stationary, however:

The fountains were awesome. 

There also were these lit-up little cars you could drive around in. Pictures were tough at this point since (a) it was dark, and (b) the cars were moving.

It was this awesome chaos on the walkways, with people walking in the dark on the same walkways with the touring train whizzing by and these people who don't know what they're doing driving these electric plastic cars. And apparently, each night, everybody lives until the next day. Apparently the standards for liability insurance in Peru are different from the United States. At the very least, the rules of liability insurance carriers do not dictate the terms of night-time fun in Lima.

As for the show, I arrived well in advance of the scheduled 8:15 p.m. show.

The show was OK.

I hate to sound like "that kind of tourist," but once you've seen the show at the fountains in front of the Bellagio on the Las Vegas Strip, this was not that impressive. The budget for the Bellagio show is significantly greater than what the City of Lima could afford. So the sound system was not as good. The music was not that loud. The movement of the fountains was not perfectly choreographed to the music. But the lighting with multiple colors definitely outdid the Bellagio.

I will say this in conclusion about the show: The fountains were sufficiently impressive without needing some organized show. I completely enjoyed walking around the fountains and seeing the colors and the water spraying without needing any "show" to make the display more dramatic. The electric carnival atmosphere with beautiful colorful fountains was more than enough entertainment for the night.

And then it was time to walk back to the hotel through the sea of humanity at the national stadium.

The Road to Machu Picchu

Train's on time.

The road is long. With many a winding turn. An overwrought pop song? Or the story of the trek from Cusco to Machu Picchu?

The first leg was by bus.

Not that bus. This bus.

The "many a winding turn" line clearly refers to all the switchbacks getting out of Cusco and then up the hill to Machu Picchu.

Then there was a train.

Not that train.  This train.

A blue PeruRail VistaDome, with glass roofs to see upward into the sky.

Which really isn't necessary because all the scenery you want to see you can see from looking out the windows to your side. You don't need the "up" view.

What, you may be asking, am I doing on the Road to Machu Picchu? You may remember me once saying that Machu Picchu wasn't really on my list. And it wasn't. Until I changed my mind. Which I did. So I went.

The train is the most common, most tourist-friendly way to go. Of course, you could hike the four-day hike along the Inca Trail that runs roughly alongside the train tracks which run roughly alongside the Urubamba River for the journey from Ollantaytambo in the Sacred Valley to the tourist town of Aguascaliente, the terminus of the rail line to Machu Picchu.

The Urubamba River looked very angry today.

I'm not sure if it is like this all year long or just the rainy season. This is, by the way, the rainy season.

The forecast was for a thunderstorms at Machu Picchu all afternoon.

These last few pics, by the way, were shot looking outside the window of the train car. That's usually not ideal, but it worked because of the amazing scenery, going from the desert-like environment around Ollantaytambo (you can see trackside prickly pear cactus growing a few pictures up) to the jungle area of Aguascalientes.

The travel from Cusco to Aguascalientes was a fairly major decent, going from the 11,150 feet elevation of Cusco, to 9,160 feet above sea level at Ollantaytambo, to a mere 6,790 feet for Agauascalientes. (We will re-ascend to 7,972 feet for Machu Picchu.) Essentially, we go from where altitude sickness is a major problem (Cusco) to maybe a little shortness of breath but no headaches or nausea (Ollantaytambo) to a problem-free elevation at the end of the line (Aguascalientes), with Aguascalientes being the elevation of Flagstaff, Arizona. And no one ever got altitude sickness in Flagstaff.

This is the tourist town of Aguascalientes.

 

Lots of bars and restauraunts, souvenir shops (usually selling stuffed llamas), and some hotels for people who have not scheduled a killer 16-hour one-day round trip to Machu Picchu from Cusco.

The final mode of transit will be another bus.

I love Andean flute music. Who doesn't. It is appropriately atmospheric for the journey from Cusco to Machu Picchu. But after listening to a steady supply of the atmospheric Andean flute on the bus and then the train, a change of pace was nice. This is what was playing on the bus when we started the drive to Machu Picchu.

Next post: Actually being at and seeing Machu Picchu. This post was just about the journey. And isn't that what's it really about it? Well, maybe not when you're talking about one of the world's major tourist destinations.

Four-stop Tour of Armenia Outside Yerevan, Featuring Mount Ararat

The Temple of Mithras in Garni.

Today was the day for a bilingual tour of Armenia outside Yerevan. Bilingual? Armenian and English? No. English and Russian. Russia is the #1 source of Armenian tourists. The rest of the tourists generally speak the international language of tourism: English.

This was not a tour with a hotel pick-up. This was a tour with one central meeting place, which was the Cascades Complex, a one-mile walk from my hotel. So I hoofed it, since the price was right.

I walked past the Alexander Spendiarian Statue en route. If you look at this photo, you will see the Mother of Armenia statue off in the distance, at the top right of the photo. I did not visit her, There's no cable car up to her like there is the Mother of Georgia.

The meeting point was in front of the Alexander Tamanian Statue in front of the Cascade Complex.

That is him. Well, his statue at least. And soon I was one of 20-ish tourists packed into a large van heading off to our first destination of the day: Khor Virap.

Let's go in.

Khor Virap is an historic monastery, built in 642 A.D., over the site of a prison (where St. Gregory was cast into the "deep pit"). You can go down into the pit, but people were a whole lot smaller back then which means the space is tiny and claustrophic and, making matters worse, packed with tourists.

This is the monastery building:

Inside:

The big draw at Khor Virap, and I mean that literally because the draw in very big, is that it is a great viewpoint Mount Ararat.

Mount Ararat is the national symbol of Armenia. It is what was once Armenian territory, but after a land swap made by the Bolsheviks, it is in territory traded to modern-day Turkey (which I know all the cool kids Turkiye with random umlauts over random vowels which ordinarily is the sort of spelling thing I love) (but I am not one of the cool kids, linguistically or any other way).

Mount Ararat also is reputed to be where Noah's Ark hit dry land when the Biblical rains came to an end. (I am not calling it a "flood myth" because the flood was 100 percent real. Every culture talks about it a massive flood inundating the earth because there was a massive flooding of the temperate 

zones of the planet after the ice sheets melted at the end of the last Ice Age. So the flood is no myth.)

Ararat more artsily framed.

The mountain is absolutely massive and dominates the landscape. If Noah's Ark did actually float around in the neighborhood of Mount Ararat, then it is no surprise that the Ark ran aground here because the odds are great that it would strike something this massive.

And with Ararat being so prominent here, this is a rendering of the dove that Noah sent that returned with the olive branch evidencing dry land ahead.

And like every good place with a view, you climb to the viewpoint:

Cross along the way:

And here's a view of the monastery from the viewpoint:

One last look at Mount Ararat before heading to the next destination:

And the next destination was Garni. Let's go in and see what we're supposed to see.

The stop in Garni was to visit the Temple of Mithras.

It was crawling with tourists.

And this is the reconstructed, rebuilt Temple of Mithras.

This is the only surviving pagan temple in Armenia. The rest were all destroyed.

It is an active archaeological site.

Note the mosaic floor in what I believe is considered to have been the bathhouse area.

All Roman temples had bathhouses. So you could be clean when you went to temple.

The temple grounds not only are an active archaeological site. It is an active instagramming site:

Although some influencers do not know to pose to get the actual temple in the background. Case in point:

These are the remnants of a large church was built adjacent to (and taller than) the pagan Temple of Mithras.

The church was destroyed in a massive earthquake a few centuries ago.

But the pagan temple still stands, although it too required rebuilding work after that earthquake.

But clearly there is more of the temple than the newer church.

Nearby was the third stop of the day.

The Symphony of Stone. It is not named because the wind through the canyon makes beautiful music. It gets its name because the lava rock cooled in such a way as the the rock resembles church organ pipes.

It's not a far walk into the canyon to check out the rocks.

Two pleasant surprises about the walk. The tour guide said that if we did not want to walk the uphill walk out of the canyon, there was a bus we could take that cost 500 Armenian dram, which is a little more than a buck in U.S. dollars. Bus? Eh. But it wasn't a bus. No.

It was a tourist train! And what sort of tourist does not love a tourist train?

The other "surprise" was that, at the end of the canyon walk, you could see the just-visited Temple of Mithras high atop the hill across the way.

Should I zoom in for a closer look?

Time to pay my 500 drams and take that train.

I actually talked a few of the others on this tour to get on board. They enjoyed the ride as much as I did. Which was a lot.

Time for lunch.

We saw Armenian "lavash" bread being made, which looked like a giant tortilla, in my opinion.

After eating, it was time for the fourth destination of the day: Geghard.

Geghard is a church that is partially in a cave. It was built to house probably the most important relic in the possession of the Armenian Apostolic Church: the spear that the Roman soldier used to pierce the side of Christ when Christ was hanging on the Cross.

The spear is no longer located at this church. It now is better protected at the Etchmiadzin Monastery in Vagharshapat, Armenia. Which was not on the day's itinerary. 

Let's go into the cave part first:

It was dark.

At one point, there was a hole where you could look down and see the church part of Geghard,

We did not have to shimmy through that hole to get to the church. This was not like visiting the "deep pit" into which St. Gregory had been thrown. We walked.

Church art depicting the Baptism of Christ:

Lots of candles being lit.

And not because it was dark in there, you cynic,

Decoration:

Crosses on the hill across the way:

Geghard is still under refurbishment.

As was the road leading to it from Garni.

The fifth and final stop of the four-stop tour was a brief visit to Charent's Arch, was is known for being a great viewpoint for Mount Ararat.

The view was so spectacular they built an arch and named it for a poet.

But, alas, by late in the afternoon things had gotten hazy and Ararat was barely visible.

Good thing I got my Ararat photos in at Khor Virap early in the day.