¡Comemos Como Limeños Ahora!

Who knew?

Lima, one of the largest cites in the Americas, has a population of ~11 million, a third of Peru's total population. Lima is a tropical desert city located on the Pacific coastal plain of central Peru.

Various ocean currents moderate the climate of the city making the weather quite mild for a tropical desert. These lush gardens at the top of the ravine are constantly watered at night by hand and by water trucks; otherwise they would be sandy dunes/slopes like the surrounding areas.


Landed at this Airbnb smack dab in the middle of Lima's coolest neighborhood, the popular Bohemian Barranco.

In the 19th century, Barranco was a very fashionable beach resort for the Limeño aristocracy and many people used to spend the whole summer here. Many of the mansions of yesteryear have been renovated by today's elite or converted into hip inns, bars and hotels. This terrace of our Airbnb looked down on the heart of Barranco's restaurant and nightlife district.

Lima is quite the international foodie destination these days. The first documented Chinese immigrants arrived in 1849 and worked in railroad construction, coastal sugar plantations, mines and guano extraction. Chifa took off after an influx of Chinese immigrants arrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bringing their tasty cuisine with them.


Chinese food became so popular in Peru that it began to influence traditional Peruvian and Andean dishes.This fusion emerged as a whole new authentic Peruvian cuisine now known as Chifa, which includes dishes like soups, stir frys, fried rice, noodles and tangy sauces.


This Chifa restaurant above had been open for over 100 years and was right down the street.

The Japanese started arriving in Lima prior to WW2 and have had a significant cultural impact on Peru. Alberto Fujimori, who I think is still in prison for murder, human rights violations and massive corruption, was the first president of Peru of Japanese ancestry.


The Japanese added Nikkei cuisine which uses Peruvian ingredientes like tropical fish, quinoa and aji peppers and molded them using Japanese techniques. In fact it was Japanese chefs who influenced the modern preparation of ceviche. Previously Peruvian chefs would often marinate the fish overnight; it was the Japanese immigrants, with their history of eating fish raw, that taught the Peruvians to treat the raw fish more simply and merely "cook it with lemon" seconds before plating. Tiradito, a raw fish dish dressed with a spicy sauce here is modeled after sashimi a la the Nikkei folks.

Speaking of Nikkei cuisine, Netflix has a documentary series on Latin America Street Food


Tomás "Toshi" Matsufuji, son of the Nikkei legendary chef Dario Matsufuji, returned from the UK after receiving his PHD in chemistry, to open the no frills, tiny10 seat hole in the wall lunch counter Al Toke Pez It is only open for lunch and there is always a line.

There are literally thousands of these lunch places serving the exact same traditional dishes all around Lima but the Netflix series made the younger Matsufuji an internet sensation, so off we went to stand in line with the other local and international tourists.



This is the meh famed combo platter; from left Chifa fried seafood rice, chicarrón fried mixed seafood and mixed seafood ceviche. The drink is chicha morada, a traditional purple corn drink.The service was fast and friendly, ~10 customers per~45 minute dining turnover time and the cost was under $8 per person.There are so many places to try in Lima, many serving these exact same traditional dishes, that although an enjoyable lunch time adventure, we won't be doing the hot sidewalk wait again.
So with all this internet buzz about fusion Peruvian food generally and Limeñan food specifically, what, kind reader you may ask, about straight up Peruvian/ Limeñan food? Isolina about 50 yards from our casa, is named after chef owner Jose de Castillo's mother, a single mother of four who struggled to make ends meet until she rented a small shop and started a restaurant.The menu offers the high end version of criolla dishes (criolla means people descended from the Spanish colonial murderers settlers but born in the Americas, versus say the indigenous people who were always here, but in this case it means home cooking comfort food) that one can find for~$5 everywhere in markets, hole in the walls and the street stalls of Lima. For a couple of weeks we noticed that there was always a line here too, so off we went.


The origins of criolla cuisine were based on hard limes and a hard environment. Similar to the American South of yesteryear, where the plantation owners got the Smithfield hams and the slaves got the pig guts, the slaves developed a delicious cuisine from what was available to them, now known as Soul Food. The same thing happened in the Americas where the Spaniards got the jamón serrano o ibérico and the slaves and underclass got the offal.


Insolino offers up vats of nostalgia and as such, it was interesting going with a preferred vegetarian leaning Lilly to a place that offers the dishes of yesteryear like fried blood stew, osso bucco, braised calf hooves, liver, gizzard stew and beef brain tortilla.


She ended up getting the lame mixed salad (South Americans in general don't do salads) and french fries (South Americans do potatoes well). I got a fried sardine sandwich, a cold poached tuna vinaigrette and Papa Rellena which is a mashed potatoes croquette stuffed with seasoned ground beef and then fried to a golden brown (did I say South Americans do potato dishes well?) Our Airbnb host said that the Papa Rellena at Insolina was the gold standard from which to judge all others. The prices on the menu above are in Peruvian Soles, 4 to the dollar, so a 40 soles main course dish is divided by 4 to get to the $10 price of a main course in a high end restaurant that serves at least two.

So we gave Peruvian food our best shot, but prefered the multitude of other restaurants that offered international food, especially the many brewpubs and French bakeries.

I didn't get a picture of Pansalaire but it was our favorite; check it out if you find yourself in Lima.

Living in the Barranco neighborhood in Lima was like living in a European city, maybe Barcelona. We enjoyed the month long urbanity of it all, a sabbatical if you will, from the rigours of South America.


We then chose to go full on tourist mode for the rest of our time in Peru. Peru Hop is a bus service that has English speaking guides on board that provide background chatter on the excursions. They stop in all of the major tourist places and you can hop off and stay as long as you want, then when you are ready to move on, you catch the next bus leaving from your town. Other advantages are that they pick you up/ drop you off at convenient places near your hotel or Airbnb, take attendance so no one gets left out in the desert, pre-order meals before rest stops, blankets, movies and offer discounts on more involved tours and adventures. All the Hoppers on the bus are foreign tourists, so there is a slight feeling of community while whiling away the long hours that you will not get on local buses. We bought a ticket from Lima to La Paz, Bolivia, a trip of~1350 miles through deserts and mountain passes, over a two month period, for $240 each.

We left Lima and headed south down the Pacific coast. Had some ceviche at a lunch stop overlooking the Bay of Paracas where an annoying Influencer type on our bus, who took multiple pictures of everything, in this case something in the bottom of her glass, thereby vexing my meal.

After lunch our next stop was the Red Beach in the Paracas National Reserve, an included free excursion. Not to quibble, but the beach was more red-ish than red, but our guide said we could always use PhotoShop when we got home.

Many Hoppers' next stop after Paracas is the site of the Nazca Lines, where some book a flight in private planes to view the geoglyphs.

There are various ruminations on the meanings of the geometric and zoomorphic designs, and you may take your pick, including the a la Chariot of the Gods one, that posits that they were some type of cosmic airport for extraterrestrial astronauts.

They had built a tower that one could huff and puff up to take these pictures. Some people on the bus who paid for the flyover said the planes were like flying lawnmowers and were happy when they landed safely.

Hopped off the bus for three days at the oasis town of Huacachina. Huacachina entertained Peru's financial elite in the 1940's and has been a popular family vacation resort for decades. It only has about 100 permanent residents, but tourists come by the thousands day in and day out. If you look closely, you can make out people who have hiked to the top of that giant dune.

Huacachina is located on the edge of the driest desert in the world (the Sechura Desert) and is the only natural oasis on the continent.


NOT SO FAST!

Nowadays it is not so natural. Bad humans have planted sprawling asparagus and orange orchards nearby and drilled wells deep into the aquifer for irrigation purposes. Consequently, local business groups have been pumping water into the lake since 2015 to keep we tourists coming.

Some of the dunes are over 500 feet high.

Hike in one direction and you are all alone.

Hike in another direction and not so much.... alone.

As I say, some of these dunes are over 500 feet high, so we I was a little wary of the big boys. So our dune buggy driver stopped at a "beginner's slope" for us to try surfing before skiing.


Luckily for me, the walk back up the slope was so arduous for Lilly, that we bagged any further sandboarding activities.

Hopped back on the bus and headed to Arequipa. Unfortunately, this was an overnight trip so we missed more of the scenery of the Sechura Desert; did get to watch Lion King in Spanish though. Peru Hop performed as advertised and dropped us off at our Airbnb at 5:30 AM. The apartment overlooks stratovolcano Misti at 18,599 feet. The trek to the crater takes two days and although no "technical skills are required", it is graded as "challenging".
As we continue following the South American leg of the Ring of Fire, volcanos abound. I think that there are five in the Arequipa area. Here are two more, Chachani and Pichu Pichu; if you look at pictures from even 10 years ago, the glaciers went much further down the slopes. Earth heatin' up ya'll.


The Incas were quite the masons as is evident in places like Machu Picchu. As they employed ashlar an ancient type of stonework that uses heavily tooled, dressed and worked stones, quite skillfully in walls, terraces and palaces, it did not go unnoticed by the Spaniards.


Various earthquakes, starting in 1540, destroyed the adobe and mud masonry colonial buildings that had been erected by the Spanish. They were slowly replaced using ashlar blocks made from the white or pink volcanic rocks called Sillar Arequipa is known as the white city because so many buildings were constructed in this way. Ashlar/sillar construction continues today in modern buildings, nice homes and parks.


Besides wandering the old city, we spent two weeks taking a break from tourism, looking out of our windows and getting acclimated to higher elevations. We are going to need it, because the next stop, Cusco, the old capital of the Incan Empire, is way up in them there hills.

Thanks for stopping by