Lickable Wallpaper

The two weeks we spent in Peru after leaving Cusco were laid back, very relaxing and pretty uneventful. After treating ourselves to a fancy night bus to Lima (not as fancy as an Argentinian bus, but pretty good nonetheless), we arrived in the Peruvian capital and took a taxi to Miraflores. Lima has a reputation for being a city full of scam artists and thieves, but the area where we stayed was actually quite nice and had a great vibe on the streets for Halloween night. The Limians really put a big effort into Halloween, and the parks in Miraflores were full of kids in fancy dress and old people waltzing to a live band and choir. There was supposed to be a party in the Flying Dog hostel where we stayed, but the bar was empty when we went in so we went back to the common area and played cards with some of the other folks staying there (and learned how to play Whist from an Irish lad in the process). The next day was spent strolling around a fancy shopping center built into a cliff at the seafront and watching the paragliders trying to take off – paragliding is one of the big attractions in Lima but the wind wasn´t up to it when we were there. At one stage we were outside a cinema looking at the listings when what felt like a bomb going off sent everybody legging it in every direction – it turned out to be a small earthquake 43 kms away that registered 4.5 on the Richter scale, but apparently these are fairly common in Peru! Later in the evening, we stocked up on fancy goods in a place very like Donnybrook Fair and had our tea in the hostel. The Flying Dog was nice (and has a good DVD collection!) but very expensive at 75 soles a night for the two of us (nearly 20 euro!). The following day we took a bus to Trujillo, a small city eight hours north and headed straight to Huanchaco, a beach town about 20 minutes further.

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