Myself and the two clients, Pat and Darren, were met at the airport in Lima by a small wide man called Julian who gave us a dazzling smile full of crooked teeth. He shook every hand with grave formality. It was 6pm local time and we were a bit dazed after 15 or so hours in planes and airports. He led us outside the terminal and at once the noise was terrific. Police blowing urgently into their whistles, swarms of people everywhere, horns blasting, traffic moving in a chaotic formation out of the airport.

Coming from a small country town in the west of Ireland, Lima was like a sensory invasion. The clammy warmth. The sucking sound of so many cars on the highway. Incessant horn sounding. The constant dizzying motion at one time of so many people in their cars or on the streets. Ten million souls in this city and it seemed as if they were all out and about that evening.  

The short drive to the hotel soon held the vague threat of a Kamikaze mission. There were lanes on the high way but nobody seemed to realise what they were for. On our mercifully short journey, we were cut up by all manner of motorists. The drivers seemed to be mostly men who aggressively nudged the nose of their vehicles over onto our lane so that Julian had to give quarter at the last minute.  At intersections there didn’t appear to be many traffic lights so cars were just shouldering forcibly onto the main thoroughfare which is obviously necessary if you have any hope of getting to your destination on the same day as you got into your car.

These interlopers caused sudden rocking stops of vehicles on the highway in the interests of keeping the occupants of all cars alive. Then everyone was off again, trying to find a gap in traffic that convulsed rather than flowed. I remarked to the guys that there seemed to be a suspiciously large number of cars with hollowed dents and large scrapes.

All the while police men and women in spotless uniform with white gloves stood on traffic islands and blew maniacally on their whistles to what end I cannot honestly say as they were comprehensively ignored.

Honking your horn at another car in the west of Ireland would be the gravest lapse of good manners. Even when some elderly farmer has dozed off while waiting to cross a junction, mororists behind wouldn’t dream of sounding a horn. Where I live in County Mayo you get a friendly nod as you’re waved onto the main road by other motorists. ‘After you’ ‘No no after you!’   

And at pedestrian crossings in towns in rural Ireland, drivers always stop to let pedestrians cross. They are then rewarded with a quaint little wave of thanks. Even younger kids do this. The shy wave. (Irish people don’t like to make a big deal of themselves.) The indulgent nod of the driver in return.

 If pedestrians at home aren’t fawningly grateful when you afford them their legal right and stop to let them cross, you know they must be foreigners.

 In Lima the people are no different to city dwellers the world over. You simply have to hustle to get where you want to go.  

And fuck the pedestrians.

Our luggage never made it so after being dropped off at the hotel near the airport I was using pantomime to explain to Julian that I needed to go to some kind of supermarket to buy a singlet and underwear. All my smalls and lighter clothing was in my suitcase which was on it’s own holidays in Amsterdam. I was dressed for Irish weather and sleeping in this heat in a jumper was out of the question.

While I made these foolish wild gestures, Julian was gazing at me with this sweet pained expression, embarrassed that he couldn’t understand me although I was the one speaking a foreign language in his country.

Finally I saw that he had a string vest on underneath his shirt so I reached my hand down underneath the collar and pulled at the strap of his vest. He didn’t react at all to this violation of his personal space and having a strange woman tug at his under garments. His expression finally cleared and he beamed. ‘Si Si!’ delighted with his illumination. He nodded and bid me to follow and we were off again on the bus, this time to a market where he left me with an aisle of knickers and wife beaters to inspect.

Julian was my first contact with the Peruvians and he represented what I came to recognise about the people throughout the following couple of weeks. Every single human that we met, even in the tourist areas where you might expect people to have a somewhat jaded approach to foreigners, possessed this simple delightful courtesy and willingness to help.

I slept in my new strange smelling vest and knickers in the airport hotel and tried to ignore the roaring of planes close over head which sounded so near that at one point I sat upright in bed fully certain that one had set down on the landing outside my room. At sea level, Lima was a far cry from the mountain top world I was soon to visit and I couldn’t wait.