by Ken McCormick
¡Lima! ¡What a hell-hole! At least at night. In the
daytime, it seemed pretty normal for a South American city.
The last time I was
there was the most colorful of my visits.
It was in the 1980’s, before the Fujimori government. At the airport, a dirty, crowded mess, there
were no lines for the long wait to pass through customs; everybody just jammed
together at the customs counter, jockeying for position. There was a guy in a military
or security uniform of some kind who had a couple of bodyguards with him, who
was apparently high on cocaine or speed or something, and who went around
picking fights with people more or less at random. A young guy next to me squared off with him, and perhaps a punch
or two was thrown, I can't remember at this point. I was afraid I might be the next target for this madness, and
maybe get hauled off to some dungeon to have the soles of my feet beaten with
nightsticks like those of a Peruvian guy I once knew, but I guess the
authorities were more hesitant to mess with tourists, because the guy with the
bodyguards just gave me a nasty look up and down and then moved on to harass
somebody else.
I noticed a
"tourist information counter" just outside customs, and I made the
mistake of thinking it might be like one of the helpful state-run services in
Santiago or Madrid. I asked them if
they'd make reservations for me at the Hotel Metropoli. That hotel was modern, well-run, and had
kept a pile of cold-weather Antarctic gear for a couple of weeks for me while I
was up in the Vilcabamba, and so I felt I owed them my business. Anyway, the "tourist information
counter" told me the Metropoli had no vacancies this night. This was a lie. There were in fact numerous vacancies at the Metropoli, but the
Metropoli had no arrangement to provide kickbacks to the "tourist
information counter."
I was suspicious, but
I went along with the story anyway, and selected another, more expensive hotel
simply on the basis of the tourist information counter's assurance it was in an
upscale neighborhood. From what I've
seen of Lima, many of the neighborhoods there can be a bit rough. They got me a hotel taxi service to share
with some other tourists. We didn't get
any break on carfare for sharing the taxi.
We drove past trash
heaps and flaming wrecks of cars in streets bathed in the usual night-time Lima
sounds of sporadic gunfire and police sirens to an old-looking, colonial-style,
rather quaint two or three story hotel in a not-altogether-safe-looking downtown
neighborhood. The other tourists got
out and entered the hotel with obvious trepidation. The driver tried to persuade me to stay here, too, but I held out
for the hotel I had selected.
We set out for my
hotel, and soon were streaking north on a throughway. I asked in broken Spanish just where this neighborhood was, and
learned that it was a half-hour to forty-five minutes outside the center of
town, so that the driver and I would both have to get up just that much earlier
the next day in order to get back to the airport on time. I told him to forget about this place, and I
asked him to take me to the Metropoli.
He was delighted at not having to drive out to the hotel I had
originally selected, and we headed right back into the center of Lima, but instead
of pulling up in front of the Hotel Metropoli as I had asked, we pulled up in
front of the same hotel at which we had just dropped the other tourists less
than a quarter-hour before.
I have sometimes found
myself in loud arguments with South American taxi drivers, but I was saved from
a cursing and screaming contest this time by the tourists we had dropped at
this hotel, who now came streaming out of the hotel's lobby, joyously praising
the cabbie as their savior and begging him to get them out of there. It seems that, in addition to being a
dilapidated flea-trap, it was about 110 degrees in the hotel's rooms, and what
little dribble of running water there was, was room temperature.
I again insisted on
the Metropoli, but the driver ignored me and took us all to another hotel on
the outskirts of town, even though, as I later learned, we were then only a few
blocks from the Metropoli. This new
place had linoleum floors in a barracks-style room that I would have to share
with two other men, and a communal bathroom.
As compared to some of the places I have stayed in, it was a reasonable
enough hotel, but by now, the Hotel Metropoli had become my cause celebre,
and I wasn't going to settle for anything less. Somehow, I managed to persuade the taxi driver to take me, not to
the Metropoli, but to another hotel on the same street that the “tourist
information counter” had also recommended.
I
looked out the window as we cruised toward my new hotel, and - praise God! -
there was my Mecca, the Metropoli! "¡Aquí! ¡Aquí! ¡Pare aquí, por favor! I
cried to no avail. The driver, deaf to
my imprecations, continued calmly on up the street right past my goal and my
burning desire, the Hotel Metropoli.
We
pulled up in front of the other hotel I had named. I got out and knocked at the door, which was locked. After what seemed like a long while, the
door opened to reveal a bellhop standing at the bottom of a narrow flight of
dark, shabby stairs to the lobby of this place on the second story. The man was drunk. The odor of alcohol wafted from his flushed body, he moved his
head back and forth in a sort of bewildered fashion, unable to quite focus his
eyes on me, and he swayed slightly, apparently having some difficulty in
maintaining his balance. I excused myself
to the bellhop, begging his forgiveness for having bothered him quite by
mistake, and I marched defiantly past the waiting taxi and triumphantly down
the half-block or so to the front of the Hotel Metropoli.
The Metropoli had
modern, glass double doors, but they were barred by means of a two-by-four
stuck through the handles. I knocked,
and a clean, sober bellhop came over and cautiously removed the
two-by-four. Just then, a fight broke
out in the street behind me. The
bellhop jumped back, and I saw the desk clerk reach under the counter,
obviously going for a weapon of some kind.
The fight did not develop into anything big, however, and was not
surging into the Metropoli, so the bellhop and desk clerk relaxed with nervous,
self-deprecating chuckles. My taxi
driver came racing in and cut in front of me at the counter and started
shamelessly trying to arrange for a kickback from the Metropoli for having
brought me here. To my surprise and
disgust, the desk clerk agreed to this.
I was depending on the cabbie to get me back to the airport early the
next morning, so I didn't start a fight, but I later advised the desk clerk
that I had practically had to hold a gun to the guy's head to get him to bring
me here.
Back at the airport
the next day, I got into an argument with the cabbie when he tried to bill me
three dollars extra for taking me to the first hotel I had chosen in the good
neighborhood forty-five minutes north of town.
I protested that he had not in fact taken me there, but had instead robbed
me of sleep by driving me all over town to hotels at which I did not want to
stay. He said he had to have the money
to pay the “tourist information counter” with whom I had arranged to go to the
distant hotel. I told him to, well,
never mind what I told him to do. With
that, I walked into the airport.
He came running up to
me in the airport a few minutes later and threatened to bring the police into
this matter. I hotly countered that I
would be happy to explain to the police what a bad name he was giving their
city by cheating tourists. He went off,
apparently trying to find a cop. I
hoped he didn't come back with that uniformed guy with the bodyguards I had
seen here the night before.
When he didn't return
until almost flight time, I thought all was well, but as I was standing about
having a pleasant conversation with someone or other, I glanced behind me to
see the cabbie approaching again, this time with a supremely wounded
expression. He now proceeded to
literally beg me for the three dollars.
He seemed to be about to break down in tears at any second. He did everything but go down on his knees
to me. I started to actually feel sorry
for this poor slob. Here was a man
driven to do almost anything more or less legal that he needed to do to grub
out a modest living. I relented and
gave him the three bucks, figuring I had sufficiently made my point.