Well I arrived in Lima after 35 hours of travelling & I was a little confused about things considering that all happened on the same day! Crossing the date line just messes with your head!

Anyhoo! After a good nights sleep, I wandered the streets of Miaflores for a little while before joining my tour group. And what a diverse group of people it is! Our group leader is Manny, a cool local from Cusco. The youngest member is 26 and the oldest is 74, his name is Fred and he's from Toowoomba. What's interesting about Fred is that he's the oldest student I know. He is currently doing a degree in electrical engineering so he can fix some things around his house after some flood damage! Doesn't everyone??!!!! I'm assuming he thought an electrical apprenticeship would take longer than a degree. He also randomly barks at dogs out of taxi windows. And so...after introductions, meeting my roomie for the next fortnight, Lisa, and a brief description of what the next few days would entail, we headed to the old part of the city.

First stop was St Francis Church where we did a tour of the church and catacombs. To me, a church is a church but the catacombs were interesting. There were some full skeletons around but in a lot of the areas, the bones appeared to be arranged by type. A little weird if you ask me. I'm assuming this would have been done in more recent times, once all the flesh had disappeared. Funnily enough, the cemetery under the church was discontinued when they eventually worked out that the reason so many people were getting sick was because of the decomposing bodies under the church & their gases rising up. It was pretty warm & damp down there. Imagine a pile of rotten bodies added to the mix...eeewwww, gross!!

From St Francis, we walked to the main square in Lima called Plaza de Mayor which is surrounded by the Government Palace, Cathedral of Lima, Archbishop's Palace of Lima, the Municipal Palace, and the Palace of the Union. It also is a bit of an area for restaurants and bars, filled with tourists taking pictures and locals trying to sell their goods. A busy spot on a Saturday night. The last square that we headed to was St Martine. The hotel that borders it is famous for its pisco sours and the monument in the middle has a lady with s Llama on her head, this was actually meant to be a flame, but the Spanish word for flame is yama and it was lost in translation! So there the llama sits on her head! The evening was finished off with a walk through Kennedy Park back in Miaflores (a cat breeding ground - the park was full of them, literally, hundreds of them) and a lovely dinner in a local restaurant, with a pisco sour & all - it would have been rude not to!

Next stop the Amazon Jungle! Make sure everything is charged because there's no power where we're headed!