Lima was our last stop. Saturday morning we went to two museums. The first and best one was The Rafael Larco Herrera Archaeological Museum which is the world's largest private collection of pre-Colombian art. Rafael had collected 45,000 pieces of pottery with some of gold, silver, semi-precious stones and textiles thrown in for good measure. Not sure if this guy is classified as a collector or a grave robber. But at least his stuff is still in Lima - whereas the 5,000 items excavated from Macchu Picchu in 1912 by the American Hiram Bingham are NOT in Peru. It still is housed in Yale University's Peabody Museum. Supposedly he put them there for "safe keeping" Yeah right... Probably the most notorious pottery in his collection were the erotic ones. The erotic pottery depicted normal types of sex and birth. The only strange thing was that in all of them the women never looked very happy. Our second museum was the disappointing National Museum. The only interesting thing here was the museum shop. This is where I finally found my "every trip souvenir" a refrigerator magnet.
