Adventures in Peru 1: Lima from above

From on high Lima doesn't look promising. Out the plane window you see miles and miles of barren grey-brown sandy mountains. They are unlike anything I've ever seen before. When we speak of deserts in the United States, we think of the Sonora with its abundant cactuses and other plant life brilliantly adapted to the sporadic but heavy rains that characterize the ecosystem, or we think of scrubby Texan brushland. Even those badlands that are truly bereft of plant life in the US often have impressive, colorful rock formations or eroded buttes or something.

But the Peruvian coastal desert has nothing. Absolutely no vegetation, because most years there is literally no rain whatsoever. I'd compare it to the rolling sand dunes of the Sahara, or the Namibian desert which, as in Peru, extends right to the seashore, but those aren't fair comparisons, because the Peruvian desert consists in real mountains. They are sandy and barren, but they are actual geological formations, and not just dunes. But they don't look like desert mountains either, those jagged creatures whose lack of vegetation cover means that the rare rainstorms that do arrive totally erode the soil away. In Peru, the absolute lack of rainfall makes the mountains into rounded, smooth lumps, as if they were mere sand dunes.

Eventually from my plane window I spot human settlements. The coastal highway is an orderly black snake surrounded by indifferent, amorphous desert, but it fares much better than the occasional groups of houses arranged hopefully into a fishbone scheme of one main street and a few side streets, all of which are merely wide lanes of unruly sand that does not stay within its assigned place in the grid pattern.

These ill-advised, isolated settlements are soon complemented by crescents of seaside highrises tiling the walls of the rocky bays. I'm sure their owners feel very elegant with their ocean views, but from above it's clear that the desert isn't planning on ceding them this space for the long term.

Now the constructed space becomes thicker, wider. There's still no vegetation, but one begins to see industrial storage tanks, ship container yards, parking lots for massive transport fleets. The city pours forth, as if bubbling up from some hidden underground source of life and abundance.

But what source of life could there possibly be here? There is absolutely no water, no plants save a few feeble, overly-optimistic attempts at irrigated lawns and crop fields. I've heard that coastal morning fog waters some plant ecosystems on the mountains, but up to now the only hints of that I've seen are dark grey mantles covering some of the mountains--perhaps dead vegetation. I don't even see the harbor that must provide the miles and miles of stacked containers I see on the land below. I have never been a fan of dry climates, and my time in Colombia has even further predisposed me to verdant, cool, wet landscapes. Here in Lima there are mountains as in Colombia, but you can't even see them because they're blocked by dust and smog. How could anybody live here, much less a city of eight million people?

The fleet of fishing boats now below the plane begins to answer my question. The Peruvian coast is the site of an upswell of cold ocean water, which feeds lots of phytoplankton at the surface, which in turn feeds anchovies, the larger fish that eat anchovies, and birds that deposit guano on the shore's rocks. Later I will find out that Lima, like the other inhabited areas of the Peruvian coast, is located where a mountain river (the Rimac, in this case) tumbles down to the ocean. For more than five thousand years, people have exploited these rivers in complex irrigation schemes that made verdant cultivated landscapes (with patches of natural floodplain forest and wetlands, too) in the middle of the desert. Lima has totally absorbed the green fields that originally attracted the Spanish (and the Wari before them, and the Lima before them) to the site, but the water that once fed fields of crops now serves the urban population's needs, and the pre-Hispanic irrigation canals still flow as "rivers" through the city's heart.

So this is my first lesson on Lima. Despite the drab, sad grey-brown aspect of the mountains around it, and indeed of most of the brick-and-concrete buildings and the sandy unpaved streets you see from the airplane, Lima's location was perfect for its first settlers. In one place they had big and small fish, natural fertilizer, and irrigated fields. Even today Peruvians of all social strata seem to consume much more fish than anyone I've seen. A plate of ceviche is tiny and expensive anywhere else in the world, but in Peru it's a generously-portioned staple at even the most basic roadside stands.

This abundance underlying an apparent barren wasteland is my first surprise in Peru, like the brightly-painted house facades that start to peek out from the drab brown landscape when your plane gets close to landing, or Lima's mild climate bathed by cool ocean breezes when you expected a hot, arid, dusty exit from the airport. After my first full day in Lima I still won't have a clear handle on what the city is all about, but the joy is in the discovery, as the city wends you back and forth between new observations and unsteady interpretations.