Blogs from Lima, Lima, Peru, South America - page 81

Miraflores is the affluent part of Lima a world appart from the cramped dusty old banger, car jammed, beep beep streets of central Lima and Hotel Kamana. It´s wide avenues, linned with designer boutiques and department stores, lead to resturaunts that over look the beach from a rocky cliff top. Surfers catch waves and paragliders ride thermals, holiday makers shop for handbags wearing designer sunglasses strolling below mirror windowed hotels that are partially obscured by fluffly white clouds. We are at high altitude here. We eat well and people watch, chat and drink Pisco sours on a resturaunt balcony taking full advantage of the four hour happy hour. Like most citys there are many sides to Lima. Miraflores is a place for the rich to play whilst the poor toil almost out of sight. We take ... read more

At 10 am his face was on the screen of the intercom, and I buzzed him in as he said "I come up." I had never met him, but had gotten a call the day before: I am .... Tomorrow I will show you how to get to work. I'll be there are 10. This was probably the fifth or sixth of these calls that I had gotten in my first five days in Lima, and I'm still not sure who all of these people are. I locked the door behind me to the empty apartment, since the woman who's home I had been living in still hadn't come back from vacation, and met the boy downstairs. Mundo Libre is the shelter for abused, homeless, and drug-addicted children that the volunteer organization had set up for ... read more

Goal #3 - Bragging Rights I spend most of the week on the patio with my laptop - typing away. I keep a steady stream of coffee running through my bloodstream to maintain focus. But sometimes I switch out the coffee for a liter of Inca Kola. Inca Kola is considered the national soft drink of Perú. It began in the mid-1930's when a Peruvian (José Lindley) born of English immigrant parents began experimenting with lemon verbena - a perennial shrub native to parts of South America. The beverage was instantly popular. For most of the rest of the century, Perú was the only country in the world where Coca-Cola was unable to dominate the market. Unable, that is, until 1999 when the Coca-Cola Company gave up and bought 50% of the Lindley Corporation to create ... read more

since i am still waiting for my plane, i thought i would take the opportunity to make a few general observations about south america... firstly you cant put toilet paper in the loo for some reason...if you do it generally results in a gross toilet explosion situation... they dont have real milk here...instead they drink condensed milk, especially a brand called gloria...this is generally vile peruvians have the sweetest tooth i have ever come across...i may have diabetes after a month in this country driving is an extreme sport...lanes dont exist and any lights are best ignored apparently coffee is v good as long as the condensed milk described above is avoided peru has 4000 varities of potato apparently rice is served with everything panatonne can be bought at every shop..no matter how small or how ... read more

My South American trip is just about done...well bar the next five hours till my flight leaves for mexico...everyone from the tour has now gone so it´s just me left now...until my new tour starts tomorrow... the last week has been fun...first we went to trujillo which is on the north coast of peru...there we saw some pretty impressive ruins...the site is called chan chan and it is from a pre inkan civilisation ....all the ruins are built out of mud bricks...but since it never rains here they have survived...a lot of the original paintings have also survived so they are pretty interesting to go and see... after a couple of days there we decided to head back down to lima....which has also been really nice....taken at a lot slower pace than the tour!...we have wandered ... read more