South America, Day 3: Lima, Peru

South America, Day 3: Lima, Peru
by Oliver Butterick

Saturday morning, I woke up without a hangover, but Tesh didn’t. Alternating hangover days is a good thing when you’re traveling. If everyone is hung over, you pretty much waste the whole day and no one wants to go out that night. Plus, it means that someone was sober enough to look after the drunken people the previous night.

The first order of business is to get into our locker and get ready for our last day in Lima. Unfortunately, we have some trouble locating the keys. Tesh had been holding the room and locker keys, but he now had no idea where they were. In fact, the details of the previous night were a little hazy to him. He remembered going to Murphy’s Pub, but he had no recollection of the two of us going back out to get food. He searched his pockets and instead of finding his keys, he found a condom. I joked that I had really taken him to a “nightclub” instead of a restaurant.

We start weighing our options. We rule out going back to the restaurant. Although I remember going there, I have no idea what it’s called or exactly where it is. So instead we borrow a saw and try to cut the padlock. Yeah, right. Umm...I think that padlocks are sort of designed in a way that makes it difficult for a person to saw through them. Pesky little locks—they actually do their job! Next, we borrow a pair of pliers and simply bend the flimsy ring that was screwed into the door of the cheap plywood locker. We find the spare padlock key, which was conveniently located inside the locker, and get a spare room key before heading out to Central Lima for some shopping and lunch.

We start browsing the shops and I pick up some cheap DVDs (actually, they were VCDs) for my nephew and we start looking for a place to get the keys copied. We start asking around for a “casa pour copia las llaves,” and we get pointed in different directions. Finally, the fourth person we asked pointed us across the street to some sort of indoor mall. Rather, it looked like a dark alley and was populated almost entirely with open-air dentist offices. It was rather bizarre—there were patients in the chairs only a few feet from the pedestrians passing by.

We arrive at a small booth with a key-shaped shingle hanging in front. We walk up to the booth and find the Key Maker. Even more than by appearance, this man greatly resembled the Key Maker in The Matrix: Reloaded due to his skills. He went right to work, taking out two blank keys, but not like the ones we have in the States. The handle looked like a key, but the rest of it was just a flat rectangle. After 10-15 minutes, he had used several tools to manually copy the keys. He replicated the bevels and filed the edges to perfection. We were watching a true artist at work. What’s even more amazing is that when we got back and tested the keys, they worked.

We had lunch at “La Merced,” a restaurant in Central Lima that was highly recommended by the guidebooks. The décor of the restaurant was very elegant, with its intricately carved wooden ceiling. We ordered from the lunch special menu, which cost only 6 soles (less than US$2). I wasn’t very happy with my meal, but Rocky’s was very good—the best out of our three meals. This would become a recurring theme on the trip.

We then started toward the Catedral San Francisco, which used to house an order of Franciscan monks. On our way, two English-speaking women stopped us. Maribel was a friendly 22 year-old Chinese/Peruvian student. She was very friendly, giving me my first kiss of the trip. Unfortunately, it was simply a European-style greeting. She wanted to go out with us that evening and gave me her email and phone number. We agreed to meet them at 6:30 at Plaza Mayor, after going to the Catedral. Meanwhile, Rocky was engaged in conversation with Maribel’s friend, a 30-something ex-contortionist. She told him that she collected coins from around the world and asked if he had any coins from the States. He reached into his pocket and pulled out some coins, but they were all from Peru. The woman looks at them and picks up a 5 soles coin from his hand. She then jokes with Rocky and basically steals the money right from his hand. Rocky tried to get it back, but didn’t want to put up much of a fight since he didn’t know what it would lead to. She finally agreed to give Rocky a photo of herself from her contortionist days.

We continued on our way to the Catedral and Tesh insisted that we not meet the girls afterward. Obviously, they wanted something from us, but we couldn’t reach a consensus on what. Here are some of our ideas:

Plaza Mayor is known to be more dangerous after 6pm when many of the businesses close, so perhaps they were going to arrange for some guys to jump us when we returned to meet them.
They had already suggested that they wanted to join us at that moment and go with us wherever it was that we were going, so perhaps they simply wanted an evening of free food and drinks, since it is customary in Peru to pay for anyone that you invite out (I had originally invited them).
The girls had joked that the ex-contortionist (a single mother) was looking for an American husband, so maybe they wanted more than just an evening out.
Maybe it was a combination, where they would seduce us into bringing them back to our hostel and then rob us, post-coitus. Rocky said that they seemed like gypsies: circus background, braided hair, flashy sarong-type of attire, and peculiar hygiene—the half-Asian girl lost some of her appeal when she smiled, revealing the advanced stages of gingivitis.

In the end, we decided not to call them, but I’m still wondering why she gave me her email address. That doesn’t really fit into any of the scam theories. As it turns out, we ended up going out with two 21 year-old Canadian women that evening...but enough skipping ahead—on to the Catedral!

Oliver can be reached at oliver@babblog.com.