"Hide Your Valuables. We Are In Callao."

Like Logan to Brisbane, the port town of Callao sits near the larger Lima and has a bad reputation. One of crime, violence and gangs. But unlike Logan, Callao has an importance to Lima; it has the international airport and Peru's main seaport too. It is the hometown of Peru's most famous bank robbers. "Jango" was so well known that as soon as he walked into a bank, bank customers would lay on the floor without him needing to draw a firearm. He later served his time in jail and is now an Evangelist preacher. "I would not want you to go to Callao alone, but you're with me so it's okay. We're not going to visit the dangerous places and I know the bad boys," Joel said when we were staying a few nights in the town. We stayed in a pleasant suburb opposite a park and school, with a mercado just behind the block.

Joel told me of a significant gang member of Callao known as Subaru. He was a young man with a lisp and robbed people with a gun and no spoken words. He happened to have a passion for salsa music and wanted to join a band. Having no experience with any kind of musical instrument, Subaru was given a guiro (a small percussion instrument). Joel, on electric bass, came to know him and one day while being mugged by a few of Subaru's boys, dropped his name and got away clean.

Another day, we wandered about its war memorial parks and museums on the coast, interesting to tourists with a passion for war. "Let's not go down that street," Joel said, redirecting us. "Have you seen those films with robbers, pow pow pow?" He made shooting gestures with his hands. "Well, it's like that over there." He went on to describe a neighborhood in Callao where police fear to tread. No cop who has ventured in those streets has come out alive.

One night as we headed back to the hostel, there was a gang of hoodlums lurking around the corner, making trouble. We dodged them and sought amnesty near a corner shop with a few other locals watching on. When they moved, we made it for the hostel, hearing police sirens howl not long after. That near incident and the fact that we were commuting into Lima every day drove us to move hostels.