Day 12 General San Martin, Peru

Again, poor readers, you will have to put up with Barry's writing as poor Jane has just come down with another flu variety and is coughing and sneezing in quarantine.

We had another early morning at the Liberador Hotel in Cusco, getting up at 4:30 AM to meet Eduardo and Hubert who would drive us to the airport where we would catch TACA flight 804 to Lima airport.

The flight was uneventful and we were met by Enrique who would drive us down the coast of Peru to meet the ship at General San Martin, near Pisco, Peru which was the Amsterdam's last port of call before setting out for Easter Island.

Since we left Lima airport about 9:30AM and we had to be at the ship before 4:30PM, we had time enough to drive through downtown Lima and see some of the sights such as the major squares. We saw the city is built on a desert, surrounded by high, sandy hills without vegetation.  This is a large city with a population of 7 million so it took quite a while to go through the city in heavy traffic.

We saw the historic section which was built to Spanish architecture with the major feature being ornate protruding balconies and elaborate scrollwork.  Soon we were on the southern outskirts when the traffic came to a standstill.   Ahead the whole highway was flooded to a depth of about 2 feet in places and some cars were stalled and being pushed through the water which was very brown. We never did find the cause of this disaster but we were considerably delayed and, once by, we started to worry about being on-time to meet the ship which certainly would NOT wait for us.   Since the next port was Easter Island, some 2400 miles to the west and accessible only through Chile at great expense, we were understandably a little paranoid about being on-time.

We had not realized that the whole trip would be a highway through a sand desert with huge dunes, some of which were hundreds of feet high.  The highway cut through huge man-made trenches in these dunes where they went across our path shoreside.  We had not realized the desperation of some of the people who had built small squatter's shacks all along the highway out of various found materials. Later we passed fields of vineyards and unmistakeable asparagus.  

We were getting quite hungry and we were wondering how we could get some decent food in such inhospitable country when we came to a town and our driver stopped at a very respectable restaurant.

By the end of lunch we did not have much time to spare as we still had over a couple of hours to go.  Our driver was asking the men at the restaurant where the cruise ship docked and nobody seemed to know, much less heard of the place called General San Martin.

We had been told that the destination was near the town of Pisco, which was the town in Peru that was hardest hit by the earthquake of 2007, with over 800 killed. There was still evidence of fallen buildings when we passed through the town headed for the oceanside to look for a large cruise ship.   When we reached the shore there was no ship in sight and our anxiety rose to new heights.  OH NO!

We asked a local police chief and he said we should drive more south so we drove many more miles to ever increasing levels of anxiety.  Someone (maybe us?) should have done more homework on the location of the cruise ship dock.  At one point we spied a distant ship on what appeared to be a far shore many miles away but, straining our eyes with the haze and distance, we did not think it was the Amsterdam.

Time was passing quickly when we finally reached a point on shore opposite the unknown cruise ship, but now we could see and recognize her lines.  It WAS the Amsterdam, but it was literally miles away and seemingly unreachable.   We pulled into one of the gates of the town's port and our driver asked how we could reach the cruise ship, to be told that we would need to hire a small boat to cross several miles of bay to reach the inaccessible ship.  We said NO to that idea and we drove further south to be told that the dock we wanted could be reached through a security gate down a newly constructed road.

We passed the security inspection with a wave of our ID cards and it was well over 12 miles around the end of the bay before the road turned to the north and headed to the distant ship.  You can imagine our relief when we reached the Amsterdam docked at such a remote  port near huge piles of long pipeline sections.  The whole port was quite new, thus explaining  why nobody knew about it.

We had time to shower before rejoining our friends, who told us of their adventures in Lima,  Pisco and a nearby marine reserve where they saw penguins, among other mini-Galapagos creatures.

That evening Jane exhibited a slight cough which was the precursor of things to come.

s to come.