Slight earthquake today ...

A bit long, but not very jarring.  A 4-pointer, centered off the coast, about 30 miles SE of Lima.

If we hadn't been on the 15th floor we might not even have noticed it.

Casa Bodega y Quadra Museum

On our trip to downtown this afternoon we took the opportunity to visit the recently opened museum at the Bodega y Quadra House, next to the old train station behind the Presidential Palace.   The house, or rather its remains, was the home of the Bodega y Quadra family in the 17th and 18th Centuries.  The patriarch of the family, Tomas de la Bodega y Quadra, purchased the property after the devastating earthquake of 1746.  The house, like so many others, had been damaged and thus the property was available at a fraction of its previous value.  Bodega y Quadra, nontheless, felt that it held promise, as its central location offered advantages given his commercial ventures.

Lima in 1685

Detail of map, showing  the area near the main square.
 The large 4-courtyarded structure is the government palace.
 The Bodega y Quadra House is the second to the left of the
 numeral 4, on the near side of the street.

Tomas, who was born in Spain, married the limeña Francisca de Mollinedo y Lozada Agüero. Together they had three children: Tomas Aniceto, Alberto, and Juan Francisco.  It is the latter of these who brought fame to the famil;y and made the site historically significant, in addition to being so archaeologically.

Remains of the colonial-era structure

Colonial-era floor

 Juan Francisco (1744-1794) upon reaching adulthood he entered the Spanish Royal Navy at Cadiz, whereupon he was detached to the Pacific fleet attached to the Viceroyalty of New Spain at San Blas, Mexico.

In 1775, Juan Francisco Bodega y Quadra was put in command of the Sonora (also called the Felicidad), one of a two-vessel expedition sent by the Spanish crown to explore and lay claim to North America's northern Pacific coast, in light of Russian advances across the Bering Strait.

After the expedition leader, Bruno de Heceta, turned back after an attack by Quinault Indians in present-day Washington state, and the onset of scurvy amongst the crew, Bodeda y Quadra continued northward, eventually reaching the neighborhood of present-day Sitka, Alaska.

Bodega y Quadra was thus able to draw the first relatively accurate maps of the Pacific Northwest coast.  In the process, he sailed over and noted the location of a reef that now bears the name of his ship, the Sonora, discovered what we today call Vancouver Island, as well as the bay in California that now bears his name: Bodega Bay.

The museum is evidently a popular school field trip.

The Bodega y Quadra home itself was remodeled, torn down, built-over, several times in the intervening centuries, housing, over time, a butcher shop and cobblers, among others.   In recent years, the Municipality of Lima took an interest in the site and funded its archaelogical excavation and the establishment of a site museum, which just opened earlier this year.

Colonial clay pipe bowl

Colonial stoneware jars and bottles

Huaráz (10,100 feet a.s.l.)

We left for Huaráz late Thursday night so as to not use a whole day on the 8 hr bus ride. We arrived in time for breakfast with our old friend Tato, who has also just arrived from Lima the evening before and was about to leave for work higher up in the mountains at the Antamina copper mine.

Our arrival in Huaráz

Benjamin, fresh off the bus

Our first glimpse of the Cordillera Blanca and Mt. Huascarán

Huaráz is a friendly, if drawn out and somewhat chaotic, city. Unlike Cusco or Ayacucho, it doesn't have a historic city center but has grown stretched out along the road through the Huaylas valley. The city was devastated in a massive earthquake in 1970, which damaged some 70% of the buildings and killed 20,000 people in town, as well as virtually wiping out the nearby town of Yungay in a huge landslide from Mt. Huascarán, where only about 400 people out of a population of over 10,000 survived.

Today Huaráz is a vibrant, lively city that feels very connected to the outside world. It abounds in cafés, restaurants, and nightclubs catering to Peruvian and international visitors as well as locals with money to spend. Huaráz is the point of departure for adventure sport tourism, including mountaineering, trekking, biking, and river rafting. However, thanks to global warming, which has melted the glaciers on Mt. Pastoruri, it seems skiing not an option anymore.

In Huaráz's Plaza de Armas

Although we did not plan it that way, we happened to arrive at the start of a week of celebrations marking the 151st anniversary of the founding of the Province of Huaráz and the dedication of Huaráz as the provincial capital. The celebrations included a multitude of parades throughout the weekend featuring dancers in traditional costumes, bands belting out waynos, and frequent setting off of fireworks.

Ica

Yesterday we journeyed four hours south to Ica, a city of over 250,000 which is the capital of the department of the same name. Ica is near the epicenter of last year's massive earthquake and signs of the damage are still evident in the city.


After my cousin Juancho finished an errand, we took off from downtown toward the Huacachina, an oasis 5 km from the city amidst the desert and sea of dunes which surround the city.

Early in the last century the Huacachina was a tourist destination, where people would spend several days bathing and boating, or just hanging out lakeside. People don't bathe in it much anymore, specially since its waterquality has been reduced due to the depletion of the aquifer from unwise farming practices such as growing water-intensive crops such as asparagus and table grapes in a rainless desert.

The oasis is still a great place to spend time, but today there is the added attraction of the desert itself, which one can view from off-road vehicle tours, which take one racing across the dunes to good sandboarding spots (the boards are provided by the tour).

"La Catedral" in Paracas

This is La Catedral - The Cathedral- an impressive stone formation in the Paracas Natural Reserve, a peninsula south of Lima and quite near the epicenter of this week's 8.0 earthquake.

For years La Catedral has been one of Paracas' main attractions, not just because of its impressive double arch, but also because of the vault that gives it its name.

Along the southern side of the peninsula there is a long arching beach at the foot of seaside cliffs. The there water is so rough and the currents so treacherous that the local fishermen named it Supay, which means "devil" or "demon" in Quechua.

In 1976 I camped on that beach for a week with my Boy Scout troop, Jesus Maria #82, and La Catedral was one of the wonders we discovered for ourselves.

The land approach is from Supay beach, and through a small door-like opening in a cliff, as can be seen in this photo from a visit I made in July of 2002 with my children, my cousins Jose Alberto and Juancho, his wife, Cristina, and their daughter, Rafaela.

Susana, Jose Alberto, Cristina, Rafaela, Nicolas, and my cousin Juancho
at the entrance to La Catedral

Passing through the entrance and through a short passageway, one suddenly came into a large vaulting cavern, open to the sea.

From the cave the double arches could be seen and the noisy colonies of sea birds observed - as long as one kept an eye open for incoming waves! If one was patient and quiet for long enough, soon sea otters' heads would pop up out of the water to observe their visitors.

The Catedral was carved by immense forces, as evidenced by the massive boulders which littered the leeward side of the cavern. This week, that process -which undoubtedly took many thousands of years- took a drastic leap forward: the earthquake caused the main arch to collapse, sealing the cavern and doing away with a true natural wonder.

Earthquake

Liz, the kids and I missed being there for the shaking by a week. We're all safe at home.

In Lima, the damage doesn't seem to be significant, except for places with older homes like Rimac and Barrios Altos, though I expect that when the news crews go out into the poor neighborhoods ringing the city they'll find a lot of damage there, too.

Among our relatives and friends, thankfully the only casualty seems to be aunt Betty's bruised hip, which she banged fleeing down the stairs of her apartment. Sara talked to Rosa and David in Ica and they are OK.

We're in Lima!

Yes, indeed, we are here. It was a very uneventful flight, but we all agreed that we rather like TACA as an airline. The service was good, the snacks and drinks were frequent, and the flights were on time.

We met up with my parents in SFO and then in San Salvador, from where we took the same flight to Lima. Nico and I agreed that it was rather frustrating being in El Salvador , seeing it out the windows, and not being able to go and poke about. As it was, we were there less than an hour before reboarding the plane and thus only had enough time to grab a coffee.



My brother Toño was there to meet us at the Lima airport, and we caught a cab to San Felipe. I was rather surprised that it was basically raining in Lima, as you can appreciate from this photo taken along Av. Pershing, which runs along the western edge of the our neighborhood. It's not supposed to do that here.


My aunts and uncles came over to the apartment later. (The apartment is on the next to last floor -the fourteenth- in the building you see in the title banner for this blog.)

We went out to dinner a 'El Corralito', which is a rotisserie chicken (pollo a la brasa) joint, which makes some of the best chicken, nicely spiced in the Peruvian style, accompanied by really tasty fries - in Peru potatoes do have a lot of flavour.

Later we retired to my cousins' apartment in the next building over. My uncle Willy, and my cousins Diego, José, Mito, and Juancho were there and after a while of chatting over some nice Argentine wines, the kids and Juancho got hungry, so some more pollo a la brasa was ordered. Naturally, this too was cleaned to the bone. Even Diego's puffball of a dog, Kafu, helped in this task.

It´s now a bit past one in the morning and I´m the last one up. It's pretty quiet, but we've already had one earthquake at about 12:30 am. No one even got out of bed.



I took a bunch of video on the way from the airport, but it either didn't turn out or the software on Toño's computer isn't the right one to read it. It's late, so I'll worry about it tomorrow.

Good night.