emotionalmarkup

The first experience I had after landing in Lima was to stroll out to the highway, backpack slung around my shoulders, and attempt to get into town the ‘unorthodox way’.

To follow the safest and easiest method - that is, to hire a green taxi from the airport to Miraflores for some $20USD - was recommended by most travellers, guidebooks and locals. However the prospect of stumbling around a six lane highway off the back of a 20 hour flight looking for a bus or an unlicensed cab seemed rather a good idea at the time.

I’d been told that buses were the cheapest (30 US cents) and most interesting method of transport. If by interesting they meant ancient, dilapidated and more crowded than the Victoria line at 8:45 on a Monday morning, then they were right. Besides the fact that it would have been more likely to grow wings and fly to Venus than to fit myself and my backpack on one of those mini-buses, I severely doubted their ability to carry me safely throughout the 30 minute journey. So I hailed down a cab, which I estimated had less internal rust damage than the others that were parked at the bus stop.

“How much to Miraflores?” I asked, trying not to sound too gringo.

The driver quoted a price half of what one would pay from an official cab at the airport, so I agreed and jumped in, ready to relax and survey my surroundings for future reference.

While most vehicles appear run down, missing parts or altogether not roadworthy, one feature is always in perfect working condition: car horns provide a ceaseless and polyphonic cacophony throughout the entire city and are used both to communicate to other road users your emotional state and to just randomly startle pedestrians and your passengers.

Once you know the system, getting around Lima is easy and insanely cheap. If you take one of the hundreds of buses or mini-buses that seem to patrol every main road you pay around 30 to 40 cents to go just about anywhere in the city. They’re not the fastest means of transport but they’d have to be the most fun. You can stand at any corner, hail one down (assuming you know where you’re going) and jump straight in to what seems like a mobile salsa club. The paint jobs and models of each bus are as eclectic as the latin music which pumps from its stereo. Sadly, their adherence to the rules of the road is just as diverse. But the locals seem to be relaxed and have no problem with the system.

When your nerves finally get the better of you the local taxis are also great value. From Lima central to Miraflores or Barranco - two of the coastal towns south of the city - it will probably cost around $1.50. Which will leave you just enough funds to afford a set menu of ceviche, roast chicken and chica morada for $2.

So I’m typing this post using Google Chrome, which I’ve been using for a few days now and to which, I admit, I’ve taken a shine. It’s easy to be disappointed by a browser - particularly if your benchmark is a customised Firefox with all your favourite tools installed. IE7 was only welcome because it was better than its treacherous little brother. Safari (on Windows) was too slow to load and Apple’s software update tool too arrogant. Opera, well… Opera is just Opera. 

The first thing that will strike you about Chrome is its speed: load time alone is enough make me want to shun Firefox for general browsing, and creating and managing tabs is frightfully snappy. When you open a new tab, Chrome presents you with a search field, your most recent bookmarks and pages visited. It’s like the borg at Google have have read my puny mind!

But what intrigued me from the first moment I laid a cursor on it was Chrome’s process management. Each tab is a new process which can be annihilated without affecting the others. This has already proven triumphant over resource-greedy tards like Acrobat Reader and caters splendidly for my habit of opening 20 bookmarks at a time.

Of course the first thing I do when any new major browser iteration is released is to verify how it renders my favourite websites. Chrome is based on Webkit - thanks, Google!

Okay. So I sound like a lollypop sucking fanboy. It’s not all party hats and fish fingers.

The lack of an ad-blocker is disappointing. It’s strange experience returning to familiar sites without your marketing prophylactic. In Chrome, some of my favourite sites, seemingly aware that they could finally spew their repressed bile at me, shot out banner ads like golf balls at a Japanese driving range.

It also has a simple development tool that comes with a DOM/CSS explorer and JavaScript debugger, which is welcome, but it doesn’t come close to replacing Firebug. Chrome isn’t yet extensible so I think it means that I’ll still have to have two browsers open:

• Chrome for browsing
• Firefox for developing, testing, FTP, Greasemonkey and everything else it does so well

Then there’s the notion of yielding to Google - which I’ve already placed in charge of my email, my calendar, my web search and only sweet Jesus knows what else - the entire range of my web browsing activity. When does it become too much?

It’s clear that Google has big plans for Chrome. It smacks of a base platform to house new and more sophisticated web applications and extensibility is on the cards. At any rate, if Microsoft still harbours any desire to remain in the browser market they’d better pull their fists out. Will the final version of IE8 be a contender? I’d bet no.

But that’s just my opinion. And, now that Google has backtracked on Chrome’s terms of use, it will remain mine.