Lima: Football and Shopping

Our next capital city, after Bogota and Quito, was to be Lima. The reviews of Lima from fellow backpackers tended to be even worse than those for Quito, with warnings of theft, bad weather and pollution!

We arrived early on Saturday morning and immediately went to bed, before setting off to get tickets for the World cup qualifier between Peru and Uruguay that afternoon. We left things a little late, so we made a dash to a local supermarket (as you can not buy tickets at the gate), followed by a race across town in a taxi to the stadium. Once there we were joined by throngs of people decked out in their Peru shirts, hats, and scarves! From outside, the stadium resembled an English council estate, and it was equally strange looking inside! As expected the stadium was nowhere near capacity - Peru had lost six games in a row and expectations amongst the fans were so low that they were claiming to be ´even worse than Bolivia!´ Typically the sun decided to appear just in time for the game and we were forced to buy some classy cardboard visors in the colours of Peru! The first half was fairly quiet and the 200 or so Uruguayan fans were making most of the noise. However, the second half was a far more lively affair as the game opened up. Towards the end of the game Uruguay scored sending the crowd into despair, only for it to be adjudged offside! Minutes later Peru scrambled the ball over the line to send the crowd and players bananas! Uruguay were then reduced to 10 men with the crowd shouting ´Hijo de puta' (son of a bitch!) as he trudged off.

The next day we decided that it was time to refresh the clothes in our backpacks. This was perfect timing as the shops were having clearance sales due to the end of winter. We bought far too many clothes (it's hard to resist Rip Curl for 15 pounds) and so spent the next day clearing space for it all! After the shopping excess we were able to watch the postponed Independance day parade, which was a fantastic mix of colour and noise.

We had planned to leave the following day, for Paracas, but had some bad luck with buses and were forced to spend another day in Lima. This turned out well as we were able to spend the day in the old town. It really was stunning, especially the main plaza and its surrounding blocks. We did a tour in the San Francisco Monastery - the highlight of which were the thousands of skulls and bones in the catacombs, and the amazing library dating from the 17th century, that looked like a scene from Harry Potter. We were also gifted a second´s glance of the Peruvian president, when the street was cleared by the police and his car entered his residence at 60mph!!

Lima, as with Quito, exceeded expectations and we are glad we went. The weather is pretty dull at this time of year, though, and very cold at night! We stayed at Hostel Kokopelli - a decent enough hostel with friendly staff, however there seemed to be a few fair people that had been there a while and so it felt a bit cliquey, also everyone was ill!!

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