The foul brew of airborne toxins swarms down the nostrils and into the
lungs, scratching its way down the hatch. The throat itches, evoking a
cough; the eyes, red, burn; various rashes appear. In the morning,
spasms of coughing and sneezing awake you as your body foolishly tries
to expel the poisons it spent the night passively ingesting.

Oh for the love of Lima.

Most tourists are smart. They stick to Miraflores, the upscale enclave
on the shore, where a vigorous ocean breeze cleans the lungs and brushes
the soot from your face.

Not me, though. I wanted to save a whopping twenty bucks for the month I
was here, so instead of Miraflores, welcome to Pueblo Libre, an
otherwise not-so-bad middle class neighbourhood quite a few kilometres
from the ocean. The only problem is that I’m living, working, sleeping,
eating, and trying to avoid exercising in a cloud of smog.

Penny wise, pound foolish, the story of my life.

There’s a YMCA not far from here, and they have a pool. (In Spanish it’s
actually an ACJ, but singing “I want to stay at the ‘Ah, Say, Jo-Ta’, I
want to stay at the ‘Ah, Say, Jo-Ta-Ah’” just doesn’t work nearly as
well.) So I went to said pool, and figured, hey, it’s indoors. I can
exercise in relatively clean air without committing pulmonary suicide at
the same time.

Taking a break between laps I looked up and through my fogged-up goggles
considered the funky ceiling design. Then I looked again, and slowly
propped the goggles onto my forehead. Oh. It wasn’t actually a ceiling
at all, just some blue tarpaulins strapped across an open space above
what was, in fact, an outdoor pool.

The second day here I was astonished to see municipal workers trawling
the main thoroughfares in a tanker truck, pumping water at dessicated
trees at the side of the way. Lima, it turns out, despite the
omnipresent coastal fog, and the constant, handkerchief-drenching
humidity, is actually a desert. The average annual rainfall here is a
mere five centimetres.

In fact winter in Lima maintains an almost constant temperature of about
15C, varying whimsically between 14C and 18C based on factors random
enough to be entirely beyond human comprehension. The only difference
between “inside” and “outside” seems to be that “inside” you cough less
and “outside” your clothes on the washing line develop a thin film of
black dirt.

I find myself suddenly musing on J.R.R. Tolkien’s choice of names in
“The Hobbit”. The dragon, the one Mr. Bilbo Baggins robs, was named
“Smaug”. Tolkien was famous for his hatred of motor cars, and always
rode a bicycle to his job at Oxford. Coincidence? I think not.

Where, exactly, does Lima’s pollution come from? Is it industrial, or
just cars, or what? From what vile monster’s belly comes this
ubiquitous, acrid belch?

An entirely unscientific, indeed un-journalistic survey (I asked my
Colombian girlfriend) suggests that most of Peru’s heavy industry is a
ways north along the Pacific coast, half a dozen hours and more from
Lima. Which leaves only one likely culprit: the automobile, and the
diesel buses that prowl and growl their way through Lima’s streets.

Lima is a city of roughly eight million people — more, if you count the
fringes — and has no train, light rail, subway, or indeed any sort of
public transportation to speak of, except for the aforementioned legion
of big buses, little buses, small buses, tiny buses, monster buses, and
vans.

They pile upon each other, nose to tail, honking and squealing and
cursing their trade, plying their moveable wares for a sol or two, an
ill word always close at hand for the passenger bold enough to complain
at rough treatment.

Living in this cloud of poison it is difficult not to get angry, not to
find buzzing in your thoughts and your dreams words like “city planning”
and “public transportation” and “lung cancer”. Peru, unlike Argentina,
unlike Colombia, is a country that does not work. Do not drink the
water; try not to breathe the air; ready your elbow for the thief at
your side.

Can we not do better, we of the West with laws that mostly work? Can we
not prevent this revolting fate, our cities reduced to poison-clad
monsters, our citizens choked by pollution, our fashionistas in shock at
the soot on their clothes?

Me? I can’t fix Peru. Don’t really want to either, considering the
Street Rudeness Factor. I got a couple weeks more to suck on bus fumes,
then I’m off back to Colombia, a country that may on paper be in the
middle of a civil war, but where at least all three major cities have
something approaching public transportation, you can drink the water,
and, most importantly, you can breathe the air.