JOHN SIMPSON

Maybe I don’t get out enough, but I’ve never been to a restaurant before where a man with a tame eagle on his arm had to stand on the roof to ward off attacking birds.

For the moment, the eagle’s services weren’t required. The terns and pelicans who at other times were inclined to swoop down and steal the food off the diners’ plates were busy elsewhere. As my friends and I walked along the pier towards the restaurant building, jutting out into the grey waters of the Pacific Ocean, we could see hundreds of birds dive-bombing a gigantic shoal of small fish. It must have stretched for a mile.

Nowadays, going back to places is one of the pleasures of my strange calling, and I’d been here before. La Rosa Nautica, on the end of a little ironwork Victorian pier, is the most charming restaurant in Lima. That means it’s the most charming in Peru, and perhaps even in South America generally.

But when I was here last, the restaurant, and Peru itself, were very different. In the dark days of 1992, the wild and insensate Maoist guerrilla group called the Shining Path seemed on the point of staging a coup d’état, and maybe forming the most terrifying government since the Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia. I had come to Peru for a secret interview with the all-powerful leader of Shining Path, Abimael Guzman, and was just making the final arrangements to meet him when he was arrested.

Having been baulked, my colleagues and I decided that since we’d come all this way we’d have to do something to explain where the BBC’s money had gone. So we decided on something equally lunatic: a filming trip to the Huallaga Valley, where the cocaine trade had its centre, and where, at that time, the Peruvian army was deeply involved both with the drug and with the wholesale killing off of local people who got in its way.

It seemed to me to be a rather long, arduous and probably painful way of committing suicide. But my colleagues all seemed a lot more enthusiastic about it than I was, so I did what I usually do when things get gloomy: I suggested we had a decent meal somewhere. Our local fixer booked the Rosa Nautica.

It was a cold, blustery evening. The little car park at the end of the pier was full of limos with blacked-out windows, and the drivers and bodyguards stood around smoking, their pump-action shotguns resting against the car wheels. Their bosses, mostly politicians and businessmen, were in the restaurant at the other end of the pier, feeding their faces and worrying about the future.

We were all a bit sombre to begin with. But after the first three pisco sours, one of Peru’s great gifts to the world, we were laughing and telling stories loudly, and the politicians faded away. I remember that evening with great affection; and the restaurant, with its wonderful late-Victorian ironwork and its windows looking out over the incomparable Pacific, has remained one of my favourite places on earth.

(For the record, we just about survived our Huallaga trip, though there were moments of considerable dodginess. One was when the mass-murdering colonel in command of one of the military bases realised that the camera which the cameraman had put down nonchalantly on the desk in front of him was recording him secretly. Another was when our bus was stopped by armed guerrillas in an area fought over by both the Shining Path and a less dangerous alphabet-soup left-wing guerrilla group. There was no way of telling who they were. If the latter, we would have to hand over a few soles and listen to a revolutionary song or two; if the former, we could expect to die very slowly and very painfully. It was a good ten minutes before it became clear the guerrillas were the milder kind.)

And now, here I was back in Peru 16 years on, marvelling at the change that had come over the place. Lima may still not be beautiful or rich, but it has long thrown off that dreadful doom-laden anxiety. Men wearing black balaclavas and carrying guns no longer patrol the streets at night. There are no bomb explosions. It’s just like any anywhere else.

As for La Rosa Nautica, it has weathered the storm with panache. My producer and fellow traveller, Oggy Boytchev, and I were hosting a lunch for the local BBC correspondent, Dan Collyns, and his wife, plus the cameraman and the historian Gustavo Goritti. Gustavo is almost the same age as I am, and he has experienced the entire roller coaster of Peru’s modern history, never pulling his punches either in his writings about the Shining Path or of the former rogue president, Alberto Fujimori. And he had survived when so many others were assassinated, even though he didn’t have the help of any muscle-bound bodyguards armed with shotguns and shades.

So it was a celebration of him, Peru, and of the pleasures of comradeship in difficult times; and the pisco sours were much in evidence again. We ate ceviche, composed of black scallops and spiced up with arnauco chilli; then a particularly finely flavoured Pacific ocean fish (I couldn’t recognise the name) gently poached in a Pernod sauce, and served with scallops and crayfish on a bed of yellow Peruvian potatoes. It was quite wonderful.

And as we talked, the anxieties of the past slowly ebbed away. Out at sea the pelicans cruised around like pterodactyls, looking for more shoals. And on the roof of La Rosa Nautica, the tame eagle sat patiently on its master’s wrist, keeping its beady eye on them. Just in case they might prefer to eat their fish with Pernod sauce.

John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on the BBC World news channel. BBC World is available in 200 countries and territories worldwide and on selected British Airways flights.