My 17 hour bus ride from
Tumbes to Lima
was actually very nice. I paid extra to get the Bus Cama which had seats
with plenty of leg room and the seats almost fully reclined. They played
good movies in English with Spanish subtitles rather than dubbed which seems to
be more typical here. I got a cab to Lionbackpakers which is in the
new part of town aka Miraflores because I needed to be close to shopping centres.
I went shopping most of the day and was able to find some pretty nice clothes
at very reasonable prices by Canadian standards. I opted out
on the replacing the tecky type clothes that I had in kind because
were only available in very touristy stores and were
unreasonably overpriced.
I was on the internet at
6:40 pm watch a crappy movie out the corner of my eye with my British dormate.
I
felt some tremors on the floor but at first i thought it was just a
train. But there was no noise of a train and it tremors
became more sustained and sever. The CD´s in the rack in front of me
started to wiggle their way out of their holder... something wasn’t
right. The hostel worker rushed into the common
room shooting at us in broken English to get out of the
building. The pavement felt like a thin rubber matt on top of
water with waves of molasses flowing randomly below it. The parked
cars looked as if a mr. invisible was jumping up and down on the
corners. The streets were full of people rushing away from the possible collapse
of building. The lights were blurred as the street lights shook frantically.
I was scarred in the slightest because even though I have never felt
an earthquake before it did not seem to me that it was severe enough in the vicinity
to cause much damage.
Shortly after the event my
Ecuadorian dormate translated the local news which informed us that
the the epicentre of the 7.7 earthquake was only 11.5 km below the
surface in Paracas, about 200
km south of Lima.
The majority of the damage was incurred at the adjacent towns of Ica and Pisco. The death
toll is at 510 with another 1,500 injured or unaccounted for as of 24 hours
after the event.
Things continue as normal
in Lima although
the roads to the south will be closed for... who knows. Life and my
travel adventures go on. The earthquake
made my problems with my missing bag to seem less significant but still
something I need to deal with. I have replaced most things, but
some specialty items like sleeping bags, mats, electronics, are either
expensive or unavailable.
