The horn on the bus goes Beep! Beep! Beep!

The one absolutely essential key element for getting anywhere in Lima is that your vehicle horn must work. If it doesn’t, driving is out of the question. I cannot begin to paint an accurate picture of traffic in Lima and all other parts of Peru that we visited. Maybe the best illustration would be to imagine a 3 lane divided highway at an intersection. It is perfectly permissible for the driver in the far right lane to turn left across all traffic and the driver in the far left lane to turn right. All you need is the guts to try it. Beep! In the meantime, the cars in the cross street are doing the same thing. Meanwhile, "normal" traffic is trying to navigate straight across the intersection.

Did I mention that there are no traffic lights or yield signs at this intersection? Doesn’t matter. If you can wedge your vehicle in front of another and blow your horn louder than the other guy you can go for it! Beeeeep! And the amazing thing is that the traffic does not gridlock; if you are blocked, just pull in front of the guy in the next lane. Beep! Up on the sidewalk? Pedestrians do NOT have the right-of-way. Beep! Near collision? Hey, the driver had at least 3 inches to spare. The mantra on the bus soon became “Don’t look, don’t listen.” You really didn’t want to know how close we came to that other bus. We felt somewhat fortunate that our bus was bigger than most other vehicles and mass carried a certain clout traffic-wise. Here it is parked outside the clinic. We really learned to hate this bus.

All cars are small. Fifteen passenger vans are legion, and then come the buses and trucks.On the route to Ventanilla most vehicles are either big trucks hauling cargo containers (Lima is a major South American Port; there are miles and miles and acres and acres of stacked shipping containers along the highway) or they are little motorcycle-based taxis, like this one.

There is no Metro or even City bus line. There are thousands of privately-owned taxis and gypsy buses and vans of all sizes. On most of these public buses there is a guy who hangs out the window, scouting for passengers; if someone waves, he has the driver stop. Anywhere. I was told it was possible to flag down a bus from a bus.

To make up for the absence of traffic lights and yield signs the highway department is overly generous with speed bumps – even on major highways. And every bump was one more jarring blow to the posterior. Altogether, we spent more than 35 hours riding buses and vans, 5 hours on trains and 18 plus hours on airplanes. By the end of the time, no wonder most of the team was singing, “I left my butt in South America.”