Look, there´s a Baxter!

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So as the title suggests, the first few days here have been accompanied by much dog-spotting, especially shouts of "Look Jon, there´s a Baxter!" We´ve done a fair amount of just wandering about along the coast and into town, exploring and getting used to being here, but nothing really of note as yet.

To be honest Lima doesn´t feel like the most exciting city - it´s different enough from what we´re used to to feel distinctly unfamiliar, without being properly crazy/exciting/out-there in the manner that a city on a foreign continent perhaps ´should´. We´ve been warned several times by fellow travellers to be wary of the locals trying to take us for a ride, and while it does seem like everyone´s got some sort of hustle, it´s not too difficult to get on with what you´re trying to do without being hassled (so not like being in Africa, for example). After paying a touch over the odds to get from the airport we´ve quite quickly learned how to bargain with taxi drivers, though we haven´t yet gone on one of the minibuses - maybe tonight on the way to the son-et-lumiere-esque lightshow... The big challenge for tomorrow is negotiating coach tickets to Nazca for friday, which will definitely test the limits of my language skills!

My personal high point so far has been a fascinating photographic exhibition in the Museo de la Nacion about the internal conflict here in Peru in the 80s and 90s that claimed thousands of lives and displaced millions more. Although most of the text was in Spanish I was surprised at how much I understood, and the photos themselves catalogued a campaign of growing brutality on the part of the Marxist rebels, the ´Shining Path´.

So, the spanish is slowly improving (from a starting point of zero, admittedly), as does the confidence in our ability to not get taken for a ride. Now on to more exciting pastures...

Jon x

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