How do make a gringo happy?

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Lima - 19th to 23rd of Feb 2009

The answer to the question in the title is easy - give them Shepard's pie, lots of vegetables and gravy after weeks of rice and rice and more rice! And that's exactly what our hostel did in Lima. Along with spag bolg and an Indian. It was like being home again!

Our bus to Lima was pretty uneventful, lots of desert and it was cheap so I can't complain. They even gave us crackers and juice. But eight hours in the middle of the day is a long trip and I couldn't even use the bathroom because the men were just opening the door and using the floor as the toilet. Yuck!

Anyway, we arrived in Lima and it was so busy. Nothing like where we've been so far. There was traffic and people everywhere but we soon got a taxi to our hostel in the suburb of Miraflores, which Fiona had booked.

It was an expensive hostel - $10 each in a five bed dorm and beers were twice the price we'd ever paid for them before. But it made up for it with it's nightly dinners which were amazing (and $4) and the atmosphere. It was strange to be back in a place where everyone speaks English. We've gotten so use to just talking to each other or speaking broken Spanish with other people since we left Montanita. All of a sudden, there was a rooftop bar full of people speaking English. That right, our hostel had a rooftop bar looking out on Miraflores Park. And McDonalds. No lie, parts of Lima is commercial as hell! Of course, Richard had to have one (or a few) since we haven't see a McDonalds since New York.

Anyway, we had some Shepard's pie and then embarked on a game of beer poker. I don't know how to play poker and we were betting fingers of beer so you can imagine how this went for me! Fiona arrived half way through and even after 32 hours of travelling, she still sat down and joined the game. Good girl!

Both Richard and I were pretty wreaked after our amazing mountain adventure so we took it fairly easy in Lima. On Friday, Rich went to play football with people from the hostel, while Fiona and I walked down to the sea. And although we could clearly see it (it was right there), we couldn't figure how to get down off the cliffs to it. Oh well. We had a walk around Larco Mar, a very fancy shopping centre, right in the cliffs and then we got free tickets to the Gold Museum. I like gold.

On Friday evening, we had some more nice dinner. Yum. And more drinks in the rooftop bar. And around 2am or 3am, we went down Pizza Street. All the bars and clubs played salsa. Great. We were home within 45 minutes!

On Saturday, Fiona and I went into the city centre by colectivo. On our walk from the main road to the Plaza de Armas, I got attacked by a water balloon. That's how they celebrate carnival here. All I could do was laugh, it really was quite amusing and the locals liked us for laughing. They all said hello again to us when we were returning home that evening.

We had a look around the Plaza de Armas and went into the Cathedral. Marie had told me she had spent a lot of time there when she lived in Lima so it was nice to see it. It's a beautiful church. We also went towards the river where there were great (for want of a better word) views of the colourful shanty towns of Lima. We then went to Monasterio de San Francisco. We had a really interesting tour of the building, with it's amazingly pretty library (I do love the books) and we heard the priests having a game of football. We also had a tour of the underground catacombs, where about 70,000 people were buried. This was really surreal. As an Irish person, I find it weird and wrong to walk across some one's grave. I also found their displays of the bones disturbing. They had separated many of the bodies into just their various bones in the 1950s, resulting in a pile of leg bones in one place and skulls in another. They thought this would interests tourists more. It just seems wrong to separate a body for a tourist attraction. They even had arranged some of the bones into patterns in places. Odd.

When we returned to the hostel, we had some more drinks and much later we went out again. We had hoped to go to an indie club but it got too late so we just went to a commercial bar/club in Larco Mar.

On Sunday, Richard finally left the hostel for a reason other than football or beer and we went to a big indoor market. It was crammed full of little shops selling shoes, runners/trainers, copied DVDs and we had heard a rumour that you could buy fake iPods there but we didn't find them. Hundreds of series and series on DVD for very very cheap, it was tempting.

We took it easy on Sunday evening because we were leaving the next day. We had some Lomo Saltada - a Peruvian dish of steak, tomatoes, onions and chips - and watched House for hours. Fun!

By Monday, Richard had decided he would stay on in the hostel for two weeks. He could work there four times a week in exchange for free board and cheap food and drink so he could save some money while I spent it! So after a sad goodbye to my travel buddy of two months, Fiona and I ventured to Pisco.

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