This past April Jeff and I went on the trip of a lifetime to Peru. Peru was never in my “top ten” list of destinations, however there is a story as to how this came about. Jeff has a friend, Paul, who he used to work with. Paul is married to a Vanessa, who is from Peru and although they now live in Vancouver, they own a couple of condos in Peru that they AirBNB when they aren’t using them. Jeff and Paul also worked with another friend, Cameron (wife: Jennifer). Paul has been asking Jeff and Cameron to visit him and Vanessa in Peru for the past decade or so, and this year it all just fell into place.
I am eventually going to write up the whole trip, but I am slowly working my way through a few thousand photos from 3 different cameras plus a few hundred extra shared and therefore downloaded from WhatsApp, so this may take a while to unravel. It’s possible this process may take as long as the vacation itself! But here, at least, is the beginning.
April 9: Arrival
Vacation began with dropping off a much-unamused cat at the Paw Prints pet motel. We’ll see if she is impressed with us in 3 weeks when we pick her up. (Spoiler: she is not). 2 1/2 hours later, we dropped the car off at the Pearson Airport Park ‘N Fly. About the Park N Fly … it’s amazing! You get valet parking, and we paid a hundred bucks extra for detailing while they have the car. I am for sure doing this from now on!
Our flights are not fun. We depart at 11:15 pm for Bogota, land at 4:00 am, have a 3 hour layover, and then a 4 hour flight to Lima (3 hours, sorry, there’s a one hour time difference. Interestingly, Peru is in the same time zone as Ontario except we are in Daylight time. You can see this more clearly if you look at a globe.) This travel itinerary would turn out to be a harbinger of much of our trip – drive a few hours, wait, fly somewhere, drive a few more hours, see something really cool! Much more on that later.
The international terminal at YYZ is no big whoop, let me just say. There was nowhere to sit at any “restaurant” and when we did find a shared table with another couple we had to order via QR code which navigated us to the most up-sell-y ordering site I’ve ever encountered. Right off the top it asked “would you like to order a bottle of water?”. I clicked “no” and then added a Steamwhistle to my order, at which point it suggested “other people who ordered this also ordered Blue Moon”. I actually got asked this question twice because I had to add the Steamwhistles one at a time. I clicked the check out button and another question: “would you like to add tiramisu or cheesecake?” Mmmmmm beer and cheesecake! My fave! You know, if it had said “big bag of chips” I might have been tempted!
We flew luxury (“premium economy”) which turned out to mean retro furnishings and an almost-but-not-quite flat reclining seat. The retro 70s look terrified me, making me think the plane was going to fall apart and drop out of the sky at any moment. In the Bogotá airport we were directed through the international connections security line, and then we were shuffled down a weirdly empty hallway like we were being trafficked and inexplicably found ourselves at a second security line. Doubly secure, I guess. We had hours to kill so found a little airport cafe and enjoyed a couple of 40,000 pesos coffees (about $8).
In Lima, we passed through an extremely efficient customs review where the officer pronounced my name with perfection and regretfully didn’t stamp our passports. Then it was off to meet our driver – finally we are the people someone is holding a sign for! Paul and Vanessa live in Miraflores, a nice and apparently quite safe part of the city about an hour drive from the airport. Their condo is on the 6th floor with a narrow balcony that is just they right size for an egg swing chair and some patio furniture. It’s also a short 20 min walk to the beach – this is a stony surfing beach, not a lie-on-the-sand-and-suntan beach. Waiting for Paul and Vanessa to arrive, we walked around a nearby park where vendors tried to sell us tourist crap every twenty feet or so. The park is beautiful, up on a high bluff that overlooks the ocean – in fact walking down the stairs from the cliff top is why the walk to the beach takes 20 minutes instead of 5. There was a nice looking pier on the ocean that Jeff wants to walk out on at some point.
When P & V arrived, we had dinner at Rosa Nautica, a restaurant that conveniently turned out to be on the very pier that Jeff coveted. Their friend Ernesto joined us. We ordered a variety of Peruvian dishes to share: paella, clams, scallops, pasta / tomato, ceviche. All delicious. Paul also introduced us to the Pisco Sour, which would become the mascot drink of our Peruvian vacation.
While we were eating, a large flock of Inca Terns came by showing off their sardine catches. I later found out these birds have a very limited range and that we were lucky to see them, but you’d never know by the numbers hanging out on the roof. We also got to see an amazing sunset.
April 10: Lima
After the overnight flight and interrupted sleep, we forced ourselves to stay up until 10 which turned out to be wise because I still got up at 6 after a solid 8 hours of sleep. Jeff, or course, slept for something like 11 hours. Typical.
Since we head to the jungle tomorrow, I was regretting my decision not to pick up a Peru birding field guide, so we walked to several bookstores, but no bueno on a local field guide. There was one interesting book of birds, but on close inspection it seemed more artistic than practical, AND it weighed about 50 pounds. We shopped instead at a nearby “plaza” – a sort of outdoor 3-story shopping mall where I picked up a couple of Under Armour sports bras and a lovely linen top. Which leads me to my first lesson on underpacking:
- I should have picked up a field guide at home.
- I should have packed just a couple more sports bras and one nice shirt (not knowing that Vanessa had booked us into several fancy Peru restaurants over the course of our visit).
- I will later wish I had packed a pair of lightweight walking shoes instead of my water shoes, for times when I couldn’t stand to be wearing the smelly hiking shoes anymore.
- Same as above, but for pants. One nice pair of pseudo-dressy pants in addition to the two pairs of hiking pants, just so I would once in a while wear something that didn’t feel disgusting.
Vanessa booked us another fancy dinner at a popular bar (ranked 13th of the world’s 50 best bars of 2025) called Lady Bee, which had a spectacular menu of cocktails and one single piece of paper for food. What more could you want?!
Next Stop: Amazon Jungle!!