For 5 soles (less than $2) you can take what you think will be a tacky tour in Lima on a small bus that leaves from the downtown area of the city and winds its way up the San Cristobal hill to give you a view of the entire city. I’ve seen a lot of cities and in general the view isn’t worth the ticket price. This one, however, was. Lima is huge, and what you see by going to museums and other tourist attractions is about one tenth of the whole puzzle. About eight tenths of the city you would never actually want to step foot into because they’re either so far away and hard to get to because of traffic, or they’re just dirty or unsafe. There are a lot of poor areas in Lima, and from San Cristobal you can see them all. You also get a very close-up view on the people who live about halfway up the mountain and get water delivered to them once a week.
All of Lima is in development. There are cookie cutter houses, apartments, and condos going up in some areas, and cheap shacks either going up or falling down in others. The city is running out of space so quickly that houses are being built into hills of dirt that don’t exactly provide the most stable foundations. For a city that has a history of earthquakes, I wouldn’t exactly call this intelligent city planning. And traffic is so bad that clouds of smog sit above the city. Only after 10 minutes on top of the mountain did I realize that finally the air was dry and my skin wasn’t sticking to my clothes.
The most interesting part of the tour was the drive up the mountain, though. Driving is an art in Lima. I have a lot of respect for taxi drivers here because for the amount of crazy driving you see on the roads, there are surprisingly few accidents. There are tiny yellow taxis that were built as cars to be used inside office buildings in Japan but made it to Lima somehow and are now used as actual vehicles on high speed roads. Never get in one of these taxis. That was the first thing I was told in my second car ride here.
Cars turn right out of left lanes because…well, in some places it’s necessary, but in others that’s just what you do. But the thing is, other cars expect it and somehow make room and don’t generally get angry. Changing lanes is magic. There’s no room and then suddenly you’re in the other lane, not dead. Stop signs are more suggestions and I’ve plowed through more than a few in both cabs and friends’ vehicles. The cabs just honk to let any cars that may be coming the other direction know that they’re barreling through. Pedestrians weave through traffic or cross at crosswalks that don’t seem to require cars to stop. It’s definitely the pedestrian’s job to find a way across a street without getting hit, rather than the responsibility of the car to not hit pedestrians.
Through all this, there’s a fair bit of order to driving in the city. Horns are used before doing something (changing lanes, running stop signs) for communication (constantly, but effectively) more than out of anger. If you need to get onto an exit ramp, you’ll find a way to do it. Weaving through traffic actually works and makes for very tight, artisanal-style driving. You may want to close your eyes and not see how you almost just hit that car next to you (but somehow didn’t), or that car ahead of you (but cars don’t break suddenly here or do anything unpredictable, really), or that sign poll in the middle of the parking garage.
So winding up the mountain to overlook the city, I had a lot of respect for our bus driver. Imagine all those tight turns and close calls but over 100 metres up on a mountain with no rails and one lane (the driver honked twice before rounding every blind bend in the road, to warn any oncoming traffic that he was coming and he wasn’t planning to slow down). So if you looked out the window all you saw was open air and the impending fall to your death off the side of the mountain. And if he stalled (everyone drives standard here, another impressive feat) we’d be walking – or rolling – a long way down.
Miracle of miracles we didn’t fall, crash into oncoming traffic, and for only 5 soles (under $2) we got the most spectacular view of the entire, sprawling, depressing, inspiring, and buzzing city.
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