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Tuesday, 07.05.2002: Paracas NP - Lima
We were back on the truck by 10am and drove the final kilometres on the Pananericana to Lima, Peru´s capital city and we voted to stay only 2 nights instead of 3 as it was very expensive - European prices!
Lima is a very big city and it took us 2 hours to drive through the ugly outskirts of Lima to finally reach the truck park. From there we took taxis to our Best Western Hotel near the beach. Fortunately the hotel was in a fairly posh area of Lima. Nearly 70% of Lima´s population is unemployed and the crime rate is extremely high.
Not far away from the hotel was the big shopping mall called Larco Mar and we all went for a late lunch and had fast food at KFC, McDonald, Pizza Hut, Burger King etc. - yummy but quite expensive!
Helen decided to get her hair cut. There was a bit of confusion over whether she was male or female!. She got shown an 80´s photo of Dana with a spiky hairdo and asked if that´s what she wanted. After the hairdresser finished with her Helen wished she´d taken the Dana haircut! All the curls were gone - the hair was so short that she looked like a bloke!
We had a group dinner that night at Mango´s - one of the restaurants at Larco Mar. Afterwards we took a couple of taxis and went to the Tequila nightclub which was actually a prostitute club! A transvestite was seen in the ladies loo. One could see the back of the heels under the door! There was loads of drinking and dancing and watching sugar daddies plying young prostitutes with drinks.
Wednesday, 08.05.2002: Lima
We went on a boring city tour at 9am but there isn´t a great deal to see and the guide insisted on pointing out all the embassies twice!! We got very confused with his directions. He kept pointing to our left and saying "to the front you´ll see ...".
We stopped in the city centre to see the Cathedral and the President Palace. At noon there is the change of guards. A military band was playing but for some reason our guide insisted to leave 5 minutes before the change. We finally got back to the hotel by 1-30pm!
We gave Melva and Elva a good send off as they were leaving the trip in Lima. We ordered room service for cups of tea (they were using our room for the day as they didn´t have to leave for the airport until 8pm) and we´d bought some yummy muffins for all of us!
Then we got the lonely planet out and told them they had a departure tax to pay which they´d forgotten about and then we made the mistake of looking at the customs section and found out that you can´t take coca leaves out of Peru. The Peruvians use them in tea but they´re actually classed as drugs and they were flying to America for 6 days before returning home to Oz!
This sent Melva into a panic as she´d got some somewhere in her bag. As she went looking she found that her talc had leaked all inside one of the side pockets of her bag and there was talc all over our room and were all sneezing like hell!!
We tried to clean everything up and Melva found a bag to put the talc in which just happened to be the bag she had the coca leaves in!! So we found them after all that!
We said goodbye to them (sniff, sniff) and we also said goodbye to Vicki, Myles, Tim and Andy who were also leaving. Max was supposed to leave but decided to stay on to Quito as she was having such a good time! She celebrated by going to the Marriott Hotel for a beauty day, told them it was her 30th birthday (a lie as it was her 29th the following week!), got 2 free bottles of good wine and could hardly walk as a result!! Bridget, who´d gone with her was having her toe nails painted, but Max trod on her foot and the woman had to do them again!!!
We all went for a pizza dinner. Max - still very pissed - was very loud and said to a guitar man that it was her birthday today. She got serenaded with loads of songs!
