Day 5

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The day started with a funny experience ordering coffee at a fancy breakfast place. The staff didn't speak English and we ended up with two huge coffees with four layers; one honey, one some kind of liqueur, one coffee and one cream. It was delicious though. The Peruvian's take a lot of pride in their cuisine as it is considered one of the best culinary cities in the word, equalling foodie heaven. As you have probably noticed I'm quite a foodie myself and believe trying everything in other countries an integral and exciting part of travelling. So today we visited Lima's food museum which contained all the history of their traditional dishes. Gastronomy is a religion in Peru and they enjoy food so much that before breakfast is over, they're already thinking about lunch.
We hadn't really researched Lima very well so spontaneously caught a taxi out to another suburb called Miraflores. I am so glad we did! It was a beachfront area similar to the Australia's gold coast flooded with tourists, beautiful parks and upper class Peruvian restaurants boasting cebiche and pisco sours. Cebiche is their most popular lunch dish consisting of raw fish marinated in lime juice and only available in the coastal cities. I tried this for dinner that night, but for lunch in Miraflores we went to Peru's most famous vegetarian restaurant/health food store where we stocked up on raw cacao (the raw form of chocolate that is one of the most nutritious foods on the planet) and healthy snacks. Peru and Bolivia are the primary source of cacao in the whole world which means I'll be in guilt free chocolate heaven for the next 25 days! 
After speaking with other tourists in Miraflores we discovered that it is unusual for tourists to actually stay in Lima central as it is too dangerous... This explains the lack of caucasian people we saw, the guard at the front of our hotel, and the arrays of police in the street with their riot shields and machine guns. We had no worries though and thought everyone was friendly... I frequently sparked up conversations with anyone I could including the policemen. 
After returning to the hotel we met our group that we will be traveling with for the next 25 days and our native leader Olly who is from Cusco. There is only 12 of us all up and we struck gold with the varying nationalities and personalities amongst us. It kind of feels like we are on the amazing race; their are two canadian sisters a few years older than me, two older sisters from Cairns, a guy named Roger.F from Switzerland, a couple from Sydney, and a mum and her two teenage boys from Melbourne. After completing the Annapurna Circuit hike in Nepal with the company Intrepid we decided to choose them again for this trip as they aren't like any other tours where you sit on a bus with 30 others and see only the commercial locations. Intrepid's goal is to take you off the beaten track and immerse you into the local communities. They only use local hostels, local/native guides and use other means to really support the underprivileged communities.
After the meet and greet we visited the catacombs underneath the Monastery of San Francisco.  It was very eery and unnerving going underground and seeing all the skeletons from the 16th century. There were over 70,000 bodies accumulated from 300 years of burying everyone who passed in Lima in this sacred place. The monastery was incredibly surreal to see, as it had preserved its original baroque style, but a few restorations have been made due to the numerous earthquakes it has endured. 
With our tight knit group of 12 plus Olly we headed out for tea and tried some more traditional dishes followed by a few pisco sours and Peruvian cocktails to break the ice.
Ultimately Lima is a city with impressive colonial history situated between a desert coast on the Pacific Ocean and at the footpath of the Andes Mountains.

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