Lima

I woke up from a 10 hour sleep on what was probably the best bus ride of my life to some soothing latin music. I turned my torso to the right, leaning back on my padded seat-bed I opened the curtain and spent an hour watching the desert merge into the churning coastline of Peru. We passed beaches, cliffs, and wide expanses of nothingness, all of which the waves pummeled with an equal intensity. I ate my breakfast of chocolate bread and fruit juice, and layed back to watch a movie about the Tsunami, sporadically being interrupted by the undulating coastline.

I arrived in Lima very content and refreshed. The others had different opinions. We met a street performer on the bus and he showed us a great little suburb of Lima where we happily spent the next 3 days. Barranco is the bohemian/student area of the city, with little parks and churches spread out between funky colonial houses and cool bars. We decided to come back and live here. Either that or in the Miraflores suburb of Lima which was filled with modern apartment buildings perched on the clifftops overlooking the sea.

We walked around the area, oohing and aahing at everything, going into cool shops and art galleries. Since it was Monica's birthday we decided to take her out to Tony Roma's for some nostalgic ribs and lemon cake. Walking back home we met our street-performer friend, Richard, again and we sat around the plaza with him and a bunch of friends, watching them juggle, unicycle, and do all kinds of tricks. Later we went to a couple of bars, all with great live music, especially one with a Nirvana/Rage cover band that we headbanged to until 2 am.

The next day we looked around the colonial center (far, dusty, but still very imposing) and the city imbetween which was a worse version of Manila with smoggy buildings and neverending over and under-passes.

We had to change hotels (fumigation) to the lap-of-luxury 2 star hotel with cable and huge rooms. We hung around with some of Richard's friends the evening and saw another great live band at the Mochilero's bar, then went to sleep with the rare sounds of TV in our ears.

The next morning, as has been happening a lot lately, we got up at 7 (ready for panic and bus-catching) only to lay in our beds till noon with our room service tray perched on our nightstand and rugby games on TV. Aaah.

When we finally managed to wake up we took the 1:15 bus to Cuzco, which was an excrutiating 23 hours of freezing cold, jerky turns and gasping for breath (thats what you get for going from 0-4,000 meters in an afternoon). I was not satisfied. Plus, my iPod semi-broke on that trip (I'm still in denial as of its actual breakage) so that pissed me off some more. But we finally made it to sunny Cuzco, which is all cobblestone streets and tile roofs. A shower, lunch, and a great massage helped solve our tiredness, so much in fact that I'm heading for bed as soon as I finish this sentence.