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Published: November 6th 2006
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Hola amigos,
Here I am in Tumbes, just south of the Eduadorian border, sweltering to death. Spent the last 4 days in Lima staying with an American girl called Holly, who we met in Bolivia. She is working there as a teacher and lives in an extremely rich area. All the houses had big surrounding walls, even bigger mean-looking guard dogs, and big cheery security guards, armed with huge guns - eeek! I know they are there for my protection, but it is still freaky walking down the street and being watched by ten armed men!
Being the swankiest area, restaurants were pretty pricey compared to other places, so one night we decided to stay in and cook our host a meal. Big mistake! We went along to the supermarket and bought tonnes of noodles, veggies etc, including what we thought was a red and a green pepper... We were happily preparing the veggies and sipping our wine when I decided to eat a raw piece of “pepper”. Let’s just say that my lips almost fell off with the burning sensation! I then made the mistake of touching my eye, and it too felt as if it were going
to fall out. It was sooo painful and I spent the next 15 minutes rolling around on the bed trying to open my eye and get my contact lens out! For some stupid reason, we STILL didn’t twig that these were no ordinary peppers... We served out the meal and it was horrendous - it was so spicy that it was inedible! Our host realised our mistake - we had bought some kind of local pepper that looks like normal ones, but you are only supposed to use the teeniest bit, not two whole ones - ooops! The meal went straight into the bin and we got take-away pizza!
On Saturday it was Holly’s birthday, so we celebrated in style by going to a pena. This is a kind of local style disco, with a live band playing Latino music. It was a really good night. We danced all night and felt really uncoordinated next to all the sleek Peruvians. Unfortunately I managed to get myself involved in another competition (just like the traumatic Navimag boat experience in Southern Chile). They dragged about 6 people to the front, and of course they wanted us, being the only foreigners. Holly, an Aussie guy, and myself were all lined up along with the Peruvian volunteers. I had no clue what we were being volunteered to do until they started a dance competition - oh no! We all decided that the three of us would cheat by going up together! I dread to think how awful we must have looked in comparison to the locals!
Still, a good night was had by all and we danced until 5am. Only realised after the event that some of the people there were actually famous soap stars in Peru. It was cool to hang out with the “creme de la creme” but we are now back to reality with a tiny hot room with cold shower and mosquitoes the size of a family cat! Sigh! Off to Ecuador tomorrow though!
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