The French Leutenant
Trip Start
Oct 25, 2007
1
19
36
Trip End
Apr 17, 2008
Lima,
Peru
Saturday, January 19, 2008
This one involves a french guy who happened to be staying in my room at the hostel in Lima. In retrospect, he either lived a life of Rambo or he is such a good lier that he believes he led the life of Rambo. I'll spare you the majority of the details except for a few juicy tales that he told me. And I'll call him the French Leutenant (FL). So here we go.
FL is the 13th child of a guy who was the french ambassador to Ivory Coast (I never heard of a french guy having 13 children). He grew up surrounded by violence and black magic, as he calls it. I am half tempted to believe this. Once, he told me, he met this really old and blind african guy who was looking for his only son and had been looking for him for over 10 years. His skin was wrinkled, his hands were shaking and his hairs were white. FL felt pitty towards the guy and bought him a sandwich. The guy bowed to express his gratitude and as he lifted his head up FL gasped - the old man had transformed himself into a youthful looking middle aged man. FL ran away scared... black magic, you see.
FL was in prison in Peru for 8 years for drug and gun trafficking. This part I actually do believe. The tatoos all over his body speak to the boredom he must have felt while in jail.
FL says he is a member of the french foreign legion (be very scared here) and that he is waiting to be choppered over to Colombia for his next mission, which consists of rescuing a french woman, the wife of a minister, from FARC who have held her captive for 2 years now. I researched on the internet and there is no such thing. The only french woman being held captive by FARC has been their prisoner for 6 years and she is nobody's wife. Also, logically he would not be discussing the objective of his mission with strangers if that really were the case. Still, it was amusing to listen.
He started showing us techniques that he supposedly picked up in army training. More likely he learned those in jail... this is where it started getting a bit scary. I'll say this though, he was very tame at the hostel. And I tried to spend as little time together as possible, but when you sleep in the same room with someone you can't avoid contact completely.
Through the course of 4 days he proceeded to give me a "2 carat diamond" which really is a zirconium; a "shark's tooth from ancient times found while diving in Ivory Coast" which really is a sea shell polished by the waves; a scarf; and tried to give me a bunch of other things which I vehemently refused, to no avail, since they ended up in my stuff anyway.
Long story short, at 5am one night I simply had enough of his BS so I started packing my bags so I could look for another hostel (yes it was that bad). FL reluctantly agreed to leave instead, and while I was in the bathroom he took off... with all my credit cards and my driver's license. Since I had his number, I managed to cajole him into giving me everything back within a few hours. Even after all this he insisted I should stay in Lima and get an apartment, and oh how wonderful it would be to have me around all the time...
Moral of the story is that you can't trust anyone, not locals and not tourists either. Not that he is a tourist but there you go, he was staying at my hostel. The latter, for those of you considering visiting Lima, is called Friend's House (the one on Manco Capac street). It's cheap and close to everything in Miraflores, but many times the front door was left wide open and the supervisors were somewhere in the back of the house so someone could have easily walked off with people's valuables. Just a word of advice.
Don't you all worry about me. I finally recovered my equipment and have moved on from Lima. With each new experience I am being increasingly careful and learning quickly not to trust people.
I'll be posting another entry on the city itself soon - contrary to most guidebooks, I found Lima fascinating. Hope you all are doing well.
