Our flight from Toronto to Lima was uneventful, just squeezed in 3 movies and a little nap. We were picked up at the airport and taken through crazy busy roads to our hotel, arriving at 11 pm. Our hotel was very quaint with lots of character and a nice sunny courtyard in the middle. We climbed up a winding staircase to the top floor. Apparently Gap Adventure tours uses this hotel a lot, and the breakfast room was full of tourists the next morning. Unfortunately, we did not sleep well because of noise, we think a late night nearby club.
There are 6 of us on this tour: our friend Heather, her kids Julia (12) and Keegan (10), her friend Pete (our age), and the 2 of us.
In the morning we met up with Paul, a local friend of Heather's, and we all decided to take some taxis to the beach. It was very rocky and very wavy. Keegan took some surfboarding lessons. It was a very pleasant 20 C day, and it was nice to walk around in shorts and tshirts.
At noon our guide Guillermo took us for lunch, very similar to Swiss Chalet. Then he and our driver Pabel took us on a city tour of Lima. Lima is the 2nd largest city in the world built on a desert. They receive 2 cm of rain a year, and it comes down in more of a mist. Lima has a population of 9 million (Peru has 29 million), there are lots of uncontrolled intersections. Cars have several types of horns, depending on what the driver feels like at that particular moment. But we've experienced this before so it didn't faze us. We stopped at a Metro for some water as the water here is not safe for tourists to drink. From there we walked through the colonial old part of the city with centuries old wooden balconies. There is a main square next to the armed and gated governor's palace. We toured through St Francis of Assissi which used to be a monastery, complete with vultures perched on the exterior. They had a library complete out of Harry Potter, with a gigantic choir book. The choir room had 150 seats, and someone had to manually turn the pages so everyone could see. We walked through the catacombs with the bones of 25000 people in deep pits.
After that we went to the ruins of Pachacamac, a city of several cultures and 2000 years old. The Spanish didn't get a chance to destroy this place because it was covered in sand and only discovered in the early 1900s. We drove from site to site and climbed up the Temple of the Sun (complete with an armed guard at the top).
We left our guide Guillermo there, and Pabel drove us to our next stop, Paracas. A quaint roadside hotel where nobody speaks English and lots of traffic (horns) driving by.
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