Draws for the Lima tournament are here.

June 17, 2024: Monday

On Friday I played the singles & doubles finals in Canada; Friday night I drove to the Montreal Airport, returned the rental car and stayed at a hotel there. Saturday morning I had a flights to Lima, Peru via Panama City. And went from long summer days (5am to 9pm light) to what passes as winter in Lima, (6:30 am to 5:45 pm light).

I flew on Copa airlines for the first time. There is no audio/visual entertainment…well on the first flight there was a kids movie on the overhead monitor, one, for a six hour flight which began at 8:40am; on the second there was no entertainment equipment at all for the 3+ hour flight. It’s just an observation…I had my iPad loaded with downloaded tv shows, and slept a bit. The terminal in Panama City is not huge and one can easily walk from Terminal 2 to 1 which I did, in about 10 minutes. Copa did change gates in Panama City but otherwise there were no surprises and both flights boarded early. When I arrived in Lima…what a different environment from the green, mountain environment in Canada! It’s urban, crowded, noisy, energetic, busy… I had booked a taxi in advance, but the driver was late arriving and it seemed as if a dozen or more people asked me if I needed a taxi ride…a bit annoying and a bit scary as well, as it was dark and around 8pm. Finally the driver arrived and we had a stop/go/nausea inducing ride to the apartment. I stayed at one Toni Novack booked for Saturday night…mine started yesterday since I wasn’t sure when the previous tournament would finish.

Yesterday Toni arrived in the morning after an all night flight and we registered and paid for the tournament, visited the grocery store (similar to Canada, much of the milk here is sold in bags), and then Toni talked to the tournament about a place to practice. It turned out that one of the tournament volunteers was a member of the oldest club in Lima, The Club Lawn Tennis de la Exposicion, in the Jesus Maria district. It’s actually the second oldest tennis club in the Americas after the Staten Island Cricket Club. Tennis is its main sport but it also has swimming, badminton, volleyball & squash. It has 17 courts (mostly red clay though I saw one hard court) plus a stadium court that can fit 2400 spectators, which is the largest stadium in Peru. It normally hosts home Davis Cup matches. (Thanks to Wikipedia and Google Translate!). The two ladies from the tournament rode with us there and we paid for the court, around $8 each plus $3 or so for the taxi.

After hitting and taking a look at the stadium court we taxied back to the club and went across the street to dinner…then I gathered up my luggage and walked the short distance to my new apartment, about 5 or 6 minutes away from Toni’s. And saw the stairs! There’s no elevator, the staircase was narrow, steep and over two stories to get to the first level. Plus there is a gate, a main door and an apartment door…all three have deadbolts. It took me a while but I managed to lug my suitcase up the stairs. The apartment is nice though, and has two outdoor areas, one off the living room and one off the next floor (reached by a spiral staircase). So I will get in my stair workouts this week. There’s a further ladder to the roof but there’s nothing up there.

And that’s a wrap on travel to Peru and Day 1. My opponents didn’t play Monday so I don’t play before Wednesday.