Sorry about that last San Diego post. We are new to this, and we didn't realize we were sending it out with a half-finished sentence. This is going to be a work in progress for us!
On to Peru though...
Our trip to Peru started out early yesterday morning when the Super Shuttle picked us up at our condo at 0630 and whisked us off to the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. The first flight to Miami left right on time (thankfully, as American Airlines recently changed our itinerary and we were slightly concerned that we had just an hour layover there to catch our international flight). The Miami-Lima leg of the journey was approximately six hours long; plenty of time to read our guidebook, watch a movie and rest up!
We arrived in Lima, Peru last night at 11 pm local time (which is the same as US Eastern time). Our guide, Victor, was waiting for us at the bustling airport. He and our driver took us straight to our hotel, the Miraflores Park Hotel. That was about a 45 minute drive through this huge city. It was really shocking to see the traffic in Lima at that time of night. It looked like rush hour in New York City!
A bit about the Miraflores area... It is called "look at the flowers" for good reason. It is an attractive oceanfront shopping and business district with six miles of parks located within the city of Lima.
We obviously didn't get a good look at the city as we were driving in at night. And as soon as we got to the hotel, we crashed into bed and had a great sleep.
Saturday has been quite a busy day so far. We awoke and ventured up to the rooftop terrace restaurant for an amazing buffet breakfast. Did we say breakfast? It was more like a feast! Every breakfast type thing one could imagine to eat was available. And the view of the city was spectacular- or would have been, but for the thick fog that was enveloping the city. The hotel sits right on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, but you could barely even make out the outline of the coast through the misty fog that continuously comes off the ocean.
After breakfast, our guide for the day, Cecil, and our driver Martin, chauffeured us for a day of sightseeing around the city. Our first stop was El Parque del Amor (Love Park), a beautiful flower-filled oceanfront expanse built for lovers. Who would have thought - a park devoted entirely to romance? At its center, there is a large statue of two lovers embraced in a kiss. Word has it that the locals compete to see who can maintain the longest kiss under the statue.
Surrounding the park are lengthy, serpentine-style benches decorated in colorful mosaic tiles. The benches feature quotations - some humorous, some inspiring, some thought-provoking - from famous Peruvian authors and philosophers about love.
You can see how overcast the day has been from the picture. The temperature is perfect though - high 60s and slightly humid with a gentle breeze.
Our next stop was the Convento de San Francisco (St. Francis Monastery). We neglected to take a photo there, but do google it to check it out if you're interested. It is really quite a lovely Spanish Baroque structure, built in the late 1600s by the Spanish Conquistadores. The head altar of the church is carved entirely out of wood, and aside from the monastery itself, there are extensive catacombs underground which were utilized until the 1800s (creepy, but well worth seeing, and incidentally, all that is left in there are a gazillion femur bones and skulls...kinda macabre; who knew they don't decompose as readily as the rest of the body?). There is also a rather large and musty old library with volume upon volume of books from the 1500s on.
We then went on to the Plaza Mayor, the main square in town which features the Presidential Palace on one side, the residence of the archbishop on another, and various other governmental buildings adjacent to these. As luck would have it (or perhaps as our tour guide arranged!), we arrived there just in time for the noontime changing of the guards at the Presidential Palace. What a well-coordinated and complicated performance this was!
We wish we had time to write more this evening, but this has taken us SEVERAL HOURS to create and it's time to leave for dinner. Love to all until tomorrow,
David and Karen
Thanks for posting your blog for our Peru-sal. It looks like you had a swell time at the ocean today. We've never bean to Lima before. Terry & Laura
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