The hotel is fine, very basic, wish we had air conditioning. They did bring us up a fan last night, which was great. This morning had their breakfast that is included in the hotel, it was OK. Andre had hotdogs, he swears they were sausages, I know they were hotdogs, so yes even in Peru they do hotdogs for breakfast.
We had pre-booked a 3 hour city tour with a guy that I found on line. We were picked up at 10AM and he took us to the Old City which is always my favourite part of the city to see. This is where the presidential residence is, as well as some beautiful old churches. We got out of the car and walked around and heard some of the history of the city. There are currently approx. 10 million people in this city, and there are only 28 million or so in the whole country, so you can imagine how busy it is here, basically Lima is Peru. Many of the people that lived in the mountains have moved to the city for a better life.
We also did a tour of the San Francisco Museum which was fantastic. If anyone is interested check out this church, it was amazing www.museocatacumbas.com . This was the only burial ground in the early years of the convent for the XVI century, they have dug down some and you can see many bones and skulls on display, but they will not go any deeper as they are worried they will collapse the church.
After our tour of the church we headed to the coast and got out and watched the surfers for a while. Not a very nice beach, lots of stones to walk over, but fun to watch the surfers.
From here our guide dropped us off at some ruins that we had read about that were within walking distance of our hotel and we were off to explore Lima on our own. We started with lunch at the site which was fantastic, a little more expensive than we would ever pay for lunch, but you can't beat the location.
This area is called Huaca Pucllana and has just been excavated starting in 1981, and it is right in the city. This was a ceremonial center that was built by people from Lima between 200 and 700 AD. Very impressive, they will not excavate the temple. You just have to use your imagination as to what is under there. Our guide was very good. He is from Lima and spent his childhood playing on these “hills” of course not knowing what was under there. It has now been taken over by the gov't and being restored and is great to be so easy to get to from the city.
There are much more impressive ruins that were the most important to the Inca that are about a 1 hour drive from here, but I'm not sure if we will make it this trip. We walked back to our hotel, picked up some bottled water on the way back and are now just relaxing out of the sun for a bit.
We meet with our group leader at 6PM tonight to find out more about the tour that really starts tomorrow. It will be very interesting to hear if there are any changes to our itinerary, this tour company is used by people from all over the world and all the poor Europeans that are stranded in airports because of flight cancellations due to the volcano eruption in Iceland, what a mess those poor people!
Had our meeting at 6PM, there were only about 17 of us there out of the 30 that should have been, hopefully some of the MIA were from North America or there are a lot of sad people out there still scrambling to get here. The makeup of the group is 2 Aussies, 2 from the UK, and the rest of us are from the US and Canada. There is one father daughter couple, she is about 25, Andre and I are the next youngest, and there is quite a gap till the next age, this is going to be quite different from our last trip, I may be the 2nd most fit woman!!!!
Our guide recommended a Chinese/Peruvian place for supper, Andre and I went there, sat down, looked at the menu and just weren't too impressed. There were very few people there, and we just didn't feel like staying so got up and walked out. Went down the street just looking around and found this place that was pretty busy so went in. What a great find, I think it was Italian (given all the Ferrari flags and stuff inside), plus the fact that it was pizza and spaghetti on the menu. No English menus and we were the only tourists there. We asked the waitress in our best broken Spanish to pick the best spaghetti on the menu and bring us that. Andre has pesto and I had tomato basil, both were very good. Andre had beer, and we both had dessert all for under $20, excellent value. When we left at about 9PM the place was absolutely packed and a band was just getting set up to get started, would have been fun I am sure, except we wouldn't have understood much!! Off to bed and a good night sleep.
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