Cusco and the vintage car museum in Lima

Lima is no beauty, but if you spend two hours riding several local buses across the whole city all the way to the edge of the desert, you'll find an awesome vintage car museum...

We need this day to recover. A room full of soaked stinking rags, a 2-hour breakfast, short walks around town. The Qorikancha palace was interesting. Originally it was the main seat of the Incas, built so that trails ran out of it to every corner of the empire. Precision work with stones weighing up to 100 tonnes, tonnes of gold and gems, rooms and floor plans laid out according to the Incas' astronomical knowledge. For example, in one room there's an altar that the sun only hits on the day of the solstice.
All that until 150 Spaniards showed up in the empire (around 1531) and within a few weeks completely wrecked the whole Inca empire. And that just a few weeks after it had been fully unified. The era of looting began, melting down every Inca decoration into gold ingots, tearing down their palaces and gradually building colonial buildings. That of course applied to the Qorikancha palace too, so all that's left of the original palace are the outer walls, and on top of them stands a baroque monstrosity built to the taste of the Spanish colonizers back then. A right mongrel.
Based on a few pieces of misinformation that came from not knowing the local language, a brutal Christianization of the locals began. Those translation mistakes were, for instance, that the Incas all called each other brother and sister. And there you had a theory of incest. Then somewhere in the north the Incas had subdued a small tribe of cannibals. And right away came the theory that all Incas eat people and that's why they have to be forcibly converted to the true faith.
The Spaniards captured the Inca king. Since they had horses, armour and swords, taking his seat was easy. Once they had him, they had basically won, because his whole nation considered him a god. If you capture a god, you must surely be an even bigger god.
The old Inca Atahualpa promised them as much gold as would fill the room he was being held in, up to the height he could reach. In exchange for letting him go. So the Spaniards had the gold brought in, then stole it, paraded the old Inca around the empire to show everyone they really had captured him and to break any resistance, and then executed him anyway.
The only place the Spaniards never even found, let alone conquered, is most likely Machu Picchu. It wasn't discovered until 24 July 1911 by the American professor Hiram Bingham.
Unfortunately the Incas left no written records at all, so everyone just guesses how many Incas lived in Machu Picchu, how long they survived there, how long they actually spent building Machu Picchu, which building served what purpose and so on.
In the evening we went to a lecture on Inca astronomy at the observatory in Cusco. The observatory is three rooms in a wooden cabin and they dragged the telescope out onto the lawn where llamas were grazing :) . But it was very interesting. The Incas learned to determine the seasons and the exact date of the solstice and equinox from the stars, which is pretty essential knowledge for farming. In Peru and around there are only two seasons, dry and rainy. Knowing when which one comes is vital.

We've been waiting at the airport for two hours for the delayed plane to Lima, so at least I can finish writing the diary :) . The airport looked pretty interesting, loads of diggers, piles of dirt and small delayed planes weaving between them. You'd think that when it's the rainy season here for almost half the year, rain at the airport wouldn't surprise anyone. The opposite is true, today all the planes were delayed because of the rain.
In Lima we decided to move into the Los Miraflores district, which is supposed to be the travellers' hub and is by the sea on top of that. It's pretty hot here, since we basically glided down for free, coasting in neutral from 3200 m to sea level.
This part of Lima is like a different world from the one we saw two weeks ago. Instead of old grey houses, modern skyscrapers, instead of stinking little IZA carts, Audis and Beemers, instead of begging grannies in headscarves, sexy babes in jeans with cleavage, instead of a market with bananas, malls with electronics. Hard to believe it's the same city.
We checked into a hotel from the LP, called Hitchhikers Hostel, a great place in the centre of Miraflores with several common rooms, a big yard with hammocks and table football, awesome atmosphere.
More interesting couples – 2 German girls from Hamburg who met in New Zealand years ago. Now they've both put their studies on hold, earned a bit of money and are travelling around South America for 7 months. Yesterday at the observatory there was another couple travelling around SA, he was from Brno, she from St Petersburg and they met in SE Asia :) . Next to them we feel like totally boring old fogeys.
There are 3 motorbikes standing in the hostel yard, one of them with a Peruvian plate. A young American guy from Massachusetts bought it here and is riding around Peru. The other two have German plates, so the Germans brought them over. It seems like a great way to travel in a country like this, like the way we partly rode across Cambodia. Maybe I'll give it a try next time too. But Patrik isn't the biker type, I'll try to talk Kuzma into it :) .
We spent the day between the dining room, the sea, a café and the Inca Market, where we bought trinkets to take home. In the evening we flopped into the hammocks in the hotel yard, Miloš cooked goulash with packet macaroni and we pulled 3 beers out of the fridge to go with it, this time 650 ml, not 1 l. :)
Those two bikes with German plates kept nagging at me. I struck up a conversation with a kid in a hammock, a blond guy with a shaved head, and it turned into a chat that ran past midnight. It really was his bike (BMW 1,200 cc, 106 hp boxer, and his mate's KTM 990 cc, 160 hp) and they were on their way from northern Alaska to southern Patagonia. They've got 7 months behind them and 5 ahead. They had the bikes flown in a wooden crate to Seattle for 1500 EUR, and from there they rode up to Alaska on their own wheels.
They've already done 40,000 km, they rode Alaska, Canada, USA, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Peru and they're heading further south through Chile, Bolivia etc. Great project, I envy them like crazy, but I just can't manage a year off. Maybe in retirement :) . Anyway, I'm thinking about who I could talk into the next motorbike expedition. (_heaven forbid – Mom_).

We're already completely lazy, so not much happened today. It wasn't until 11 that we dragged ourselves away from emails and news (there's WiFi here, the iPhone does the job even though there's a computer). I even tried a Skype video call straight from the phone. Pretty funny sitting in a pub in Lima and making a video call to the Czech Republic for free. When we set off to the USA for the first time in 1994, the only contact with home in three months was one phone call, which we then nearly had to pay off in instalments :).
Miloš and I took a bus to the Museo de Automovile. It was 20 km away on the edge of Lima, but the bus only costs 1.5 soles (10 CZK). It was an interesting excursion, we crossed the whole city and it's nowhere near as poor as it looked in the centre. Loads of new cars, modern glass buildings, KFC, Starbucks and a new car dealership on every corner. I watched the bus's progress on the navigation and it really was bravely honking its way towards the La Molina district.
When it started heading away from our destination again, we got off. We wanted to do the rest by taxi, but he wanted a ridiculous amount, like 80 CZK :) . Unfortunately we're out of local currency, so even 10 – 12 soles is a problem.
So we sat down in a café at a petrol station, had sandwiches, sausage and beer. The first time in Peru we could pay by card!
In the end we talked a taxi driver into taking us for 2 dollars. At the intersection he stopped at a money changer who gave us 5.5 soles for the two dollars.
The car museum was right on the edge of town, on one side stuck against the first dune of the desert. But what was inside took my breath away. 120 cars from 1901 all the way to the 60s and 70s.
Ford T, Ford A, old Rolls Royces, Cadillac, Buick, the first Ferrari, a car custom-built for Rockefeller, one for the Peruvian president, pieces from series of 10 or 70 units made, simply fantastic.
The trip back was easier, I changed 20 EUR with a money changer from the taxi and for 20 soles and about 25 minutes we were back. One more round of local specialities in a little pub in Miraflores – Ceviche Mixto, Pilsen and Pisco Sour.
A shower at the hotel, a taxi to the airport, 3 hours of queues and hassle with formalities and hooray, off home!