In Lima

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Hello everyone hope you are all well! We have covered a lot of miles in the last 10 days, Whistler - Vancouver- London- Leicester via Ashdon (it´s in Essex for those of you who don´t know) - Birmingham - Newark - Lima. So as you can imagine there hasn´t been much time to update anything really. We said our goodbyes to the snow and wonderful scenery and people of BC and have been enjoying the heat and bustle of Lima for the past couple of days.
We´re staying in Barranco, a seaside suburb outside of the city centre, and what a good idea that was after experiencing "downtown" yesterday. I guess it´s pretty much the same as every major city centre, busy, noisy and polluted but we weren´t expecting it to be so hot and pretty humid as well. There are some very impressive buildings and plazas, we watched the changing of the guard outside the Palacio de Gobierno which was very musical and long, a good 45 minutes, of which we caught the end 10 minutes or so. I think we didn´t perhaps make the most of our time there having gone without any real plan of what to see and where it was so spent a fair bit of time wandering aimlessly - lesson learnt for the rest of the trip. However we managed to get to San Fransisco church and catacombs which was very beautiful and creepy. The catacombs are where the city used to dump the dead bodies and cover them with quick lime to aid fast decomposition. In short there are alot of bones down there under the church I believe the guide said that they estimated that they´d uncovered the remains of about 25,000 bodies and think there may be other "deposits" underneath other churches throughout the city. In one room they´d done somthing very creative with some what could be leg bones and skulls arranging them in a circular pattern, which was nice.... Unfortunately we could not take photos during the tour so you can´t share in the visual delights.
We managed to negotiate a taxi home outside the Gran Hotel Bolivar although I´m not sure how and feel a bit sorry for the nice taxi man who after all the confusion gave us a ride for cheaper than the set price on his list. Our Spanish lessons clearly were not quite enough. Barranco is a nice little place with plenty of old colonial style buildings and also sleek new apartment blocks - and I mean very nice modern places with ocean views that probably cost a small fortune. It is known as more of a creative neighbourhood and there are some very nice modern art and craft galleries in the plaza around the corner from where we are staying. It gets alot of sea fog here and it´s been great to sit and watch the fog roll in like smoke giving the whole place a kind of otherworldy atmosphere. It´s a shame we can´t stay a couple of days more as there are some good museums and also an ancient pre inca pyramid in the neighbouring suburb which we have missed plus all the usual city delights which we could have made a bit more of. However tonight we have a 15 hour bus journey down to Arequipa in the south, it´s meant to be a very beautiful place with plenty to do so this time we´ll be prepared..........

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Photos

Lima Cathedral
Plaza de Mayor and Lima Cathedral

Changing of the guard
Outside the Palace de Gobierno, it was pretty warm and they´d been at it for 35mins already

The view to Miraflores
Looking up the coast to the neighbouring suburb at sunset

Delapidated building Barranco
This impressive wreck appears to be in use still - or at least the wings are

Church Barranco
On the main plaza in Barranco, topped with sea fog