Lima

We are suddenly on the Southern hemisphere hanging upside-down - at least compared to our usual Northern hemisphere experience and instead of being ahead of Greenwich time we are lagging behind. All these changes to digest within the frame of 2 and a half weeks during which we have been to six countries on three different continents. It has distorted our sense of time and space in general. While we were used to moving 600km in 12 hours on a bus, crossing thousands of kilometres by plane introduced a bit more of confusion. Especially that the local conditions varied tremendously. Comparing Yangon to Bangkok is one thing, and comparing Yangon to London where we landed one day later is yet another.

Anyway after our six day visit to Buenos Aires we boarded a plane to Lima. For some reason we imagined that it will be a short 1,5 hours maximum type of intra European flight. It was strange though that we got pillows and blankets, we were informed about a coming film and dinner to be served - all in such a short time… We burst out laughing seeing the astonishment on each others face when it was announced that the flight will be 4 hours 40 minutes and it would add another 2 hours time difference to our Central European time (summing up to 7 hours).

Managing your expectations is always the best way to make yourself happy, and anyway, during our trip so far we learned that a new place is always unpredictable. First of all we have sometimes ignored some advice (vide crossing the boarder to Nepal where a general strike took place) or taken it a bit too seriously (vide Myanmar where we have landed with our backpacks full of dry noodle soups in case we had nothing to eat). Based on the information we gathered about Lima we had nightmares how awfully dangerous, polluted and ugly it will be, so we planned as short a visit as possible in the possibly safest barrio.

As we had enough of adventures during the last couple of weeks we decided to book a hotel in advance and pre-order a taxi. When we landed in the modern Lima airport (it is tricky to judge a country by the airport you land in as i.e. Myanmar has also a very modern airport but the rest does not live up to it), found our taxi driver, took local money from ATM, locked the taxi doors from inside as advised, prayed to God to arrive without being robbed and set off on the road...The road led us through a district full of huge shopping malls with all imaginable global brands what already made us wonder how can it be so dangerous if you seem to have all the big companies doing business here ?!

Most of the scary stuff proved to be some illusionary tales by people who never went out of their safe countries...and somehow made it to Peru without being anywhere else...Obviously it might not be the safest country on the planet but it is far from being ultra dangerous, or after the land of Buddha and Hindu Gods we had a very fast acclimatization in Buenos Aires, where after the first shock we safely survived several pick-pocketing attempts and a double attempt to be cheated by our hotel receptionist J ...

We arrived safely and stayed in a nice hostel in Miraflores and the next day went sightseeing...The main square was beautiful and the whole centre was full of extraordinary Catholic churches (in Asia we had an overdose of Buddha temples and here it seems we are going to be cured by an overdose of Catholic ones). As usual we have also seen anti-governmental demonstrations. It seems wherever we go we end up in a place of unrest. Argentina was the same not to mention any of the South East Asian countries we have visited. We ended the day in a very nice cafe sipping Coca de Mate tee and preparing for our bus ride to Trujillo where we are to stay for longer. The bus we took was as luxurious as the premium business class on Thai Air with fully reclining seats, a DVD and bus assistant serving food and drinks. Our luggage was collected at a check-in desk 30 minutes prior to departure, our fingerprints taken and lastly we had to cross a metal detector. So much about the scary Lima... We enjoyed ourselves in Lima as if we arrived home. Our low expectations surely helped, or our survival instinct, since this country will serve as our home for some time now J