Ormeño – bus company from hell
It often surprises me that at bus stations across Peru and beyond I see hundreds foreign tourists travelling with Ormeño, widely known here to be one of the worst bus companies on the continent. Unfortunately it’s a bus company featured in many of guidebooks written by people who seem to have never stepped foot in Peru.
Many people across Peru like buying a warm brown slimy liquid from the local friendly health drink salesman each night or each morning.
Called emoliente, the natural remedies contained within each drink, added in differing amounts, are supposed to cure all sorts of ailments.
Since returning from Chile, the streets of Lima have been plastered with the faces of halfwits and losers politicians declaring not much more than their names. These guys are not all bad though, many municipalities in Lima are being run increasingly well, though this is always the case a few months before elections, but perhaps it’s because all the real lunatics and idiots prefer to run for President.
The Mercado Central is a collection of streets in central Lima where you can buy just about anything. You’ll find little in the way of photos of these streets – as any cameras that take them will soon be stolen.
I managed to take these photos of the market without loosing my camera.
From there we walked further to the Monasterio de Santa Catalina, and brilliant blue and yellow convent. After a quick trip through China Town to buy oil for some homemade chifa and we were ready to go home.
On leaving Lima to travel to Santiago I didn’t have time to mention the opening of the refurbished Avenida Miguel Grau. As this blog states the job cost $18.5 million. Read about this 3.5km street in the link above.
But why is this interesting?
We had taken a bus to Santiago from Lima which made crossing the border simple. On the return however, there was no such bus, at least for a few days anyway.
We were able to take a bus from Iquique to Arica easily and had a good journey. The 4 hours on the bus were interesting as we spent them watching hundreds of tornadoes sweeping through the distant desert. I tried to get them on camera but they just wouldn’t turn out. The two photos attached to this entry are the best I could do, and I needed to turn up the contrast to get to see anything, but they still don’t give a feeling for how it really looked.
WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization, charged with protecting intellectual property around the world, has handed over Peru’s intellectual property to the Chileans. They have again agreed that the 476 year old Peruvian grape brandy called Pisco was invented by, and all rights to the name are owned by, the 465 year old Chilean nation.
At the end of the parade, the new President and Michelle Bachelet waved to the people. My only good photo of them both together was blurred.
Between smiling, Alan was aggressively barking orders at his incredibly incompetent security services. There was a flurry of activity from security at the end of the parade due to an event that happened when he was taking his seat…
At the end of the display in Las Palmas I came face to face with the President himself. President for one more week that is.
Today the World Heritage Body rejected a motion calling for cuts in carbon emissions after heavy lobbying from the Bush administration.
There are 125 Unesco World Heritage sites that are under threat from global warming, some of which are in Peru, including the area I visited a couple of weeks ago – Huascaran National Park.
Weather in Lima has been changable of late as the onset of winter really gets going.
During the winter months, which last from about now until November, the city if often covered in sea mist called la garúa. You may think a city in the center of one of the world’s driest desert coasts would make it totally devoid of moisture… but you’d be wrong. It’s this yearly fog that allows the desert ecosystem to survive. The plants suck it up, the animals eat the plants.
