You never know what you’ll find in an archeology museum

Lima, Peru, Sunday, September 23, 2018 — “There are about 45,000 artifacts in the Museo Larco,” said Sheila, our Alexander + Roberts guide to Lima, Peru, “and you will see about 38,000 of them.”

The full name of the Museo Larco is the Museo Arqueológico Rafael Larco Herrera. In 1926, at the age of 25, Rafael Larco Hoyle founded the museum. Today it is an overwhelming display of pre-Columbian artifacts. Actually, they are mostly pre-Incan because the Spaniards destroyed most of the Inca work in their search for riches. Golden art works were melted down and either shipped to Spain or stuck in the conquistadors’ pockets. Not gold? Those were discarded.

There were a few gold pieces, mostly mixed with copper for stability.

The museum offers row after row of clay faces, “the cultures’ form of writing,” Sheila said.

Examples of ancient textiles included a rug that was 3,000 years old.

Sheila did not accompany us into the “Salon exotica.” Not sure what she would have said in there. But she led us to the door and said, “That’s a part of life as well.”

It’s an interesting job she has. She works as a freelance guide to work all year. She studied tourism for a degree and then studied English for three years in a language school.

She will drop our group off at the airport tomorrow (5 a.m. wake-up call!) and then pick up a new group in the afternoon to tour Lima. Upcoming trips include a week in Cusco and then a cruise in the Amazon region. When she goes outside the Lima area she turns the guiding over to a local person (as they do for her in Lima) and serves more as a facilitator, coordinating transportation, hotels, boarding passes and all the other things one of our tour identified as “sure nice to be babysat for awhile.”

Sheila also provided a birthday celebration that night at the dinner at the museum to our oldest member who turned 83. Excellent meal of an appetizer of potatoes (3,000 varieties in Peru), chicken salad, olives and a quail egg on top. Entrée was rice with seafood (shrimp and scallops) with pasta in tomato sauce and creamed dessert of a fruit similar to avocado (lucuma?) that tasted like butterscotch.

Loved having Sheila as our guide with her amazing knowledge of the city and the museum, often stopping to point out some of the masks that had been restored. And my favorite quote from her concerned the obnoxious habit of Lima drivers to rely heavily on their horns: “Honking horns is like our national anthem.”

On to Cusco.