Bye Peru

---

Miraflores is the affluent part of Lima a world appart from the cramped dusty old banger, car jammed, beep beep streets of central Lima and Hotel Kamana. It´s wide avenues, linned with designer boutiques and department stores, lead to resturaunts that over look the beach from a rocky cliff top. Surfers catch waves and paragliders ride thermals, holiday makers shop for handbags wearing designer sunglasses strolling below mirror windowed hotels that are partially obscured by fluffly white clouds. We are at high altitude here.

We eat well and people watch, chat and drink Pisco sours on a resturaunt balcony taking full advantage of the four hour happy hour.

Like most citys there are many sides to Lima. Miraflores is a place for the rich to play whilst the poor toil almost out of sight.

We take a taxi to the airport to depart for Quito (Ecquador). Driving past the black market stalls where good copies of everything are sold but gringos should go in groups of five or six the taxi driver advises. We pass a prison, many of the walls in this area are daubed with graffiti that says ´ño la padra´ - ´no to unemployment´. Kids play football on municipal concreat pitches, dads drive motor bikes with kids riding pillion. A boy kisses a girl in the park. I ask the driver if he feels Obama will be good for Peru, he does. He also thinks that I look like David Becham and Michael Owen. We chat and laugh in a mixture of his limited English and our poor Spanish. It´s fun.

I had a mixed time in Peru. It has to be one of the most beautiful and diverse places I have ever been lucky enough to visit, leaving me at times breathless and speachless. However the experience in Lake Titikaka was not to my taste the beautiful sceenery was, for me, spoiled by the clammer for tourist cash. The constant offer of souveniers, the invite into the home that is just another sales opportunity seemed demeaning to both tourist and local. The guide told us that tourism brings money to the island that helps buy books and build schools but the fourteen year old girl who was looking after us was missing school to do so. Is the tourist money educating the next generation of tour guides? Something bothers me about this. I don´t want to visit ´theme park´ Peru and I feel that the people of the Islands on lake Titikaka deserve a better future than to be gauped at by tourists. I did not ask them what they wanted for their future I wish I had.

---

Comments

[celia]

better future for Peru
Hi, End corruption, bring on democracy, enforce human rights, free education for all children to 16, listen to the people - where have we heard these calls before?!? Unfortunately the poor are exploited world wide! Keep safe - love Celia