Lima

We arrived in Lima late in the evening on July 8th and taxied ourselves to the Inka Lodge in the neighborhood of Miraflores on the Pacific Coast. Central time zone, gray skies like the Pacific Northwest, and cold. We spent the next day rolling around the city looking for the last few pieces of video equipment we´d need. We were directed to one block with about ten tiny little electronics shops, one of which had every little connector and cable we needed.

The next day, we met with the director of a filmmaking collective called Grupo Chaski that Maya had heard about through working with Women Make Movies - they had distributed a film of theirs called Miss Universe 1982, which we watched before we left - kind of unintentionally hilarious, lots of melodramatic shots of Quechua women face-on watching the beautiful women while they sat there quietly suffering. The collective was in a house in a neighborhood called Chorillos, the nicest place we saw in Lima, a huge beachfront with the city in view through lots of haze and smog, and nowhere in our Lonely Planet. He set us up with a guy in Cusco who will provide us with a production assistant who speaks Spanish and Quechua. He sets up ´microcinemas´ all around Peru, and we are going to try to help him set one up in OTT (Ollantaytambo for short), where they screen films, mostly documentaries, shot in and about local towns. They´ve made several that include OTT.

He was an amazing guy - named ´Stefan´, with long white hair and a slick vest. He used beautiful old pens and all his notebooks were bound in thick leather. We left and wandered around Chorillos, our first real taste of aimless travelling - we had a huge meal of steak and chicken, served to us on a platter over hot coals, at what was basically a chain fast food place in Chorillos - and had our first Inka Cola, a flourescent lime drink made by Coke that´s supposedly bad for you like Mountain Dew.