Our bus journey to Lima was easy enough considering it took 16 hours. We left Arequipa at around 5pm and were treated to 3 straight crappy films with English subtitles before bed. We woke up the next day to find that the bus was a couple of hours behind schedule, so we had to endure another couple of movies, including some Mr. Bean film I didn´t even realise existed, before we arrived at 9am.

The city of Lima is huge, with over 7 million inhabitants, but our hostel was quite close to the bus station, so it only took 5 minutes in a taxi before we arrived. The hostel was OK, but the beds were quite hard, and the place needed a lick of paint. It certainly wasn´t up to the standard of our lovely room in Arequipa, which was annoying considering the price was the same. Still, we got to check in at 11:30am, which is far earlier than some places we have been.

As we were situated in the business district, there really wasn´t a great deal to do in the immediate vicinity. The only restaurants we could find were in a shopping centre food mall, so most of our meals for the next few days ended up being fast food. We spent the evening looking around the shopping centre, and couldn´t really adjust to the Christmas feel. With less than a week until Christmas, all the shops were decorated just as they would be in England, with Santa´s and fake snow everywhere. We were walking around in shorts because it was bloody warm outside!

The next day was a pretty lazy one, but I had to get up for a telephone conversation with a lady from my previous work. Everything went pretty well, and I´m hoping they can sort out a job for my return. In the afternoon we sorted a bus up to Mancora, where we would be spending Christmas. We had hoped to fit somewhere else in in-between, but the bus routes were limited, so we were stuck in Lima for a few more days. This wasn´t ideal as it isn´t the most exciting city we´ve been to. We had a couple of days out sightseeing, but another two were spent waiting around in the hostel, pretty bored.

On our third day we decided to actually get out and do something, so we took the bus to the town centre. Though the buses are pretty run-down, they are actually amazingly efficient. We never had to wait for longer than 30 seconds as there is a constant stream of ´colectivos´coming along, and they only cost about 20p per journey. We wandered around the main plazas for the afternoon, which was nice enough, then went back to the hostel for the evening, where we treated ourselves to yet more fast food.

The other day that we decided to go out, we ended up in the more up-market area of Miraflores. There are a few nice parks and shops in the town, and we took a looping walk down to the seafront and along the beach. There were a few people out swimming or surfing, but the sky was quite overcast, so it didn´t look too pretty. Quite a lot of people were hang-gliding though, which was quite cool. We walked back up to the cliff-tops for some nice views, then got a colectivo back home.

In the evening we decided to go to the cinema. We wanted to watch Avatar, but the film was dubbed. Instead we watched a film with Bruce Willis called Surrogates. It was OK, but remarkably similar to I-Robot.

Eventually we headed on to Mancora. We had enjoyed our time in Lima, but probably spent a day or two too long there, and were definitely ready for some new scenery.