Our hostel was located in Barranco, which is a nice seaside suburb south of the centre of town. When I say seaside I mean on cliffs by the sea, but the view was nice nonetheless and there were plenty of sweet looking apartments that wouldn´t have looked out of place at the Viaduct in Auckland or Oriental Parade in Welly.
As per usual the day after a night bus is a bit of a write off for me and today there was no exception. After a nice nap Simon and I checked out the local neighbourhood and grabbed a bite to eat. The evening we spent at a restaurant in a seaside (read once again cliffside) mall with great views of the Pacific Ocean. Following dinner we headed to a bowling alley decked out in fluro and an alien theme. Good times and a few beverages helped to loosen up the bowling arm!
However, the day didn´t come without cost! Simon and I were taking a few B&W photos of some of the antiques in our hotel when I tried to pull a golf club out of a golf bag with my camera still in my hand, and ther cord not around my wrist. Murphy´s Law dictates that my camera gets dropped, goes smashing to the floor, and the lens is well and truly buggered. So the next day the first port of call was to buy a replacement camera, and an expense I could have done without but hopefully insurance will cover it.
Post camera shopping, our guide Kike took us to a market in central Lima called Polves Azules (literally Blue Dust in Ingles). This place was stocked wityh heaps of electronic goods, DVDs, CDs, etc. We went to this one DVD store and bought a total of 160 DVDs for US$160. Great bargain. Some of my purchases were Blood Diamond, The Departed, 300 (which I then proceeded to go see at the cinema that night - I bought it cause it was cheap), Apocalypto, The Good Shepherd and The Last King of Scotland. Some of the girls bought all the series of Friends, and you could get the same for a whole raft of series (eg The Simpsons, Family Guy, etc). A great place and if ever I am back in Lima I will head along with much more space to spare in my backpack!
Out third day in Lima was spent sightseeing and doing the typical tourist thing. We stopped first at the Plaza de Armas to scope out the changing of the Presidential Palace guard. A nice building, with colourful soldiers (who had terrible marching!) in funny Napoleonic hats, but I couldn´t help thinking it´s a poor imitation of the one at Buckingham Palace. Also of fame in the Plaza is the Cathedral which houses the body of Francisco Pizarro, with his head in another coffin. He was the head honcho Conquistadore until he was murdered in Lima by the son of a rival he had executed. Fair enough I suppose.
After the Plaza we walked around the corner to the Monastery of San Francisco. This Franciscan monastery was built in the 16th century and it was wonderful wandering the cloisters and seeing the beautiful artwork adorning the ceilings. Beneath the monastery is catacombs that housed copious skeletons from those people who died in Lima up until the 18th century. Some of the bones are arrange in neat patterns, eg femurs spread out into a big circle. I didn´t feel right taking photos of people´s graves/bones so no pictures to satisy those of you with morbid curiousity. I really enjoyed the monastery as it fit in nicely with a favourite book of mine called The Name of the Rose, which in summary is a murder mystery novel set in a monastery in the 13th century.
In the afternoon Simon, Mitzi, and I took a taxi a long way out of downtown Lima (as suggested by Kike) to the Museo de Archeaolgica y Anthropoligica. This was a nifty museum that traced Peruvian history from Chavin de Huantar (about 1500 years pre JC) all the way through to contemporary Peru. The Chimbu and Moche (of Chan Chan and Temple of the Moon fame respectively) made an appearance. So too did my favourite period of Peruvian history, the Incas and the Conquest.
That evening after a really disgusting pizza, a further disappointment in Peruvian cuisine, we headed to an all you can drink bar to party it up for our last night in Lima. We all had a great time, and after some dancing with the local ladies (its quite hard to keep up the pace!) you can work up a bit of a sweat. No worries, out comes a big bucket of foam which procedes to dump constant foam on the dancefloor for about 30 minutes. Needless to say I was straight in to cool off!
Apart from the camera experience, I had an enjoyable time in Lima and I think it would be somewhere I would return to to check out a few things I never got around to doing.
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