To Lima – 5/2/2013
May 3rd, 2013 by rallyadmin
We’re greeted to our first cloudy day since we left Santiago. There’s a heavy overcast and a few miles up the road, the windshield starts to mist up. And a few miles later still, the road is fully wet. It never does actually rain. But the change from the super bright but dusty days is a welcome change.
We’re on our way to Lima which sits astride the Panamericana. More accurately, it blocks the Panamericana. Unlike, the nearly empty highways and roads of the countryside, Lima is pretty much overrun with vehicles. The moto-taxis and buses bring traffic to a crawl. And the aggressiveness of the drivers raises what we’d seen in Ica and Arequipa by and order or two of magnitude.
John drives in the city for a while and then hands the car over to me at when we stop to look for a Mapfre insurance office in the center of downtown Lima. We’ve been driving without insurance since we entered Peru.
We’ve been trying to find any place to purchase the obligatory (what we call liability or the Chileans call third-party insurance) since we entered the country to no avail. That made the night drives into Arequipa and Ica all the more nerve-wracking.
We had been driving up to Lima and seeing numerous signs advertising for auto insurance but we couldn’t find an office to stop in and actually buy it. We finally found a brand new Mapfre office on the road but the man in the office said that this office couldn’t sell it to us but he thought that the main office in Lima could. He gave us to address and we set out to find the office. Now, here we are wandering about central Lima, following the GPS route, trying to find the Mapfre office.
Of course, it’s never that easy. The GPS doesn’t always have the correct street info so often times it tries to send us the wrong way on one-way streets or tells us to make turns that are blocked by medians. When we pass on the instruction, it petulantly goes off and “calculates” a new route which means that we don’t have any guidance while it’s “calculating”. By the time it gets over its little tantrum, we’re usually off on our own which leads to another “re-calculating” session.
So, by the time we get to the general area of the supposed Mapfre office, we can’t find it. John pulls into a quiet side street and parks. I stay with the car (Lima is renown for its car breakins) and John goes off on foot trying to find the office.
About a half an hour later he returns. No office. He’s asked people but they either say that he’s in the right spot or that we’re in completely the wrong part of the city. But no one actually gives enough of good help to find the office. We start driving around the area looking for a Mapfre sign. They were every km on ther Panamericana. Nothing here.
We finally throw in the towel and decide to leave Lima and continue north. We’re not very happy about this but we’re probably two days from Ecuador and maybe we’ll find the insurance in a smaller sity on the way.
Of course, now we are really turned around and have no idea which way is north out of Lima. We enter the name of a city on the Panamericana that’s north of Lima and the GPS goes into “re-calculating” mode. But this time, it comes right back with a route (it probably had a bit of guilt for the last disaster) and has us turning left, right, right, right, etc. We miss a turn and have to drive a ways before turning around to the correct route. The GPS takes it all in stride. There are times when I really wonder about this GPS.
And the the “miracle of the day” happens. We’re driving down a very busy boulevard and there on a building in huge red letters is a Mapfre sign over what appears to be an insurance office. I stop, John jumps out, I leave to find a parking space. I pull into a space in a controlled parking area. Lock the car and go off to find John.
I walk back to the corner where I dropped him off but no John. I walk around some but still no John. Maybe he’s getting some insurance. It could happen. Then it’s back to the car and orbit the area until John shows up at the agreed upon corner. Still no John. I park in a secured lot and start walking back to the corner. As I pass the a door under the Mapfre sign, I see John who motions me into the office.
“Do you have $65?” “Uh, yeah, back in the car.” “Good. We have insurance. For a year. Henry, this is my friend, Paul.” I go back to the car to get some greenbacks and when I return, the insurance docs are printed and ready for signing. We chat with Henry (his brother is in the States – he’s a chef for Radisson), thank them and head back to the car.
Hooray! We have insurance. And it’s good in Ecuador, too. Colombia will be another matter. But the mood of the car is generally very relieved. WE head out of Lima to continue north on the Panamericana.
Well, we try to leave Lima. The GPS leads us to a bridge over an expressway that is the Panamericana in downtown Lima but when we cross the bridge, it wants us to make a sharp righthand u-turn on to an exit ramp to the expressway. We pass. The GPS goes into a “re-calc”. Next it has zig-zagging through a very sketchy neighborhood which we really don’t like. When we come upon a police armored car, we decide to hightail it back to a main boulevard and regroup.
The GPS finally gets a decent route but the route heads us back into deep central downtown Lima. Grrr. We follow it because we have no choice but eventually it does get us on the expressway and into the madness of Lima traffic. Of course, now that we have insurance, the driving is a lot less tense. We finally get out of Lima and, more to the point, out of Lima’s traffic.
We driving north on the Panamericana and the plan is to stop BEFORE SUNSET! We’re decide on a town named Barranca. The guide book says there are 2 cheap hotels there. There could be more. It’s on the beach. We take the left off the Panamericana and the pavement disappears.
Oh, crap. It turns out to be just a short distance but when we get back on pavement we’re in a small, rundown town with no hotels. We go a couple of kms into the town before we give up and head back to the Panamericana to re-evaluate. We decide to go back to a larger town that we had passed, Huacho.
It’s actually quite a bit bigger and a lot busier. We find our way to the beach and find a small hotel that (surprise!) has rooms. There’s a restaurant just down the street. It’ll do.
We didn’t make our goal of stopping BEFORE SUNSET. We made it to the outskirts of Huacho by sunset and it wasn’t totally pitch black when we found the hotel. It was totally pitch black by the time we finished dinner and checked in to the hotel. We’ll call it a win.
So what have we learned today, class? We learned that if you’re lucky you can stumble on auto insurance in Peru. The guide book lies about Barranca. And you can make a pretty good dinner out of fried calamari, onions, fries and a beer.
Obi-wan