Lima the horrible and majestic (Drive Day 164: Dec 10, 2003)
We could try to find a more central place to “camp” in the city writer Sebastian Salazar Bondy called “Lima the Horrible” but the guard at the rec center where we’ve parked says we’re welcome to stay. So for the second time we lock up the Avion and hop on a bus. Which breaks down and requires swapping for a smaller van. The driver’s helper provides the entertainment – yelling out approaching stops, jumping out at those stops and twirling our destination sign like a sidewalk vendor, flirting with girls, collecting fares, slamming the side panel door shut and leaning out the one open window until the process repeats itself the next block over. It takes two hours to arrive and another ten minutes to uncramp our legs and unstoop our backs. We walk through streets lined with majestic buildings of another era, heading for the intriguing museum of torture. It’s short on signage but houses what look like implements of an inquisition and we decide that it should commission one of the outskirt buses as a modern exhibit.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa. Like travel anthologies? I’m in a brand new one called Alone Together: Tales of Sisterhood and Solitude in Latin America which you can get here.
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