One day in Lima

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We are up at 1am to catch our flight to Lima and join our next tour. The hotel concierge has been helpful with online checkin and all goes smoothly. As we stan in line to board a ground crew member comes by calling my name. Excellent, an upgrade to business class. Ah no, I have been randomly selected for a baggage check. As we scurry to the depths of the airport I realise that my bag contains half of Linda’s stuff. We had consolidated to one bag (her’s) to go to Glalapagos and had not repacked. What had she left in mine??

Well, a power bank as it turned out, which I popped into my backpack but they had a good fossick through anyway and then sent me back! I suspect Linda was more stressed than I was.

We arrived in Lima (8 million people) for the morning rush hour - horns, cars everywhere and general chaos! However we reached our hotel ok and after breakfast and a bit of a recharge in th lounge as our room was not ready we went out and explored the Miraflores area. It had a pleasant park which was full of cats. A nearby building was demolished and they all np I grated to the park. People feed them and they just chill out on the grass and in the trees.

We meet the other 11 in our group and our guide Mike at 2pm and head off exploring. We go back to the same area as earlier for an early meal and then head into the historic centre to visit the catacombs. The city centre is beautiful with lovely old Spanish style buildings and squares. There were people wandering around everywhere. We managed to misplace four of our group but we went off to the Franciscan monastery and joined the tour. It was a beautiful, ornate building with lots of gold everywhere. In the basement the bones of the monks and well to do in society were kept.

After a wander back to the main square, we have another exciting taxi ride home and prepare for the next exciting stage.

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