Sun 4th Jan: Lima

We got into Lima at 9am this morning. I took a taxi to a hostel in the wealthy suburb of Miraflores. Approaching Lima we passed some o fthe shanty towns which dot the desert around the city. Some of these shanty´s are huge with populations of up to 40,000. I´ve been told one of the older ones even has its own University now. These shanties can appear almost overnight as immigants and the landless stake claims on free lands. The ones I saw weren´t this large but one in particular was an eye-opener. We crested a ridge and suddenly it was there, spread across a dusty plain. Houses of all shapes and sizes occupied individual plots. Some were cobbled together with scraps, others were built from brick. The streets occupied dusty gaps between lines of houses. The odd car was parked outside some of the better houses.

When I reached the Hostel I had to wait while the rooms were cleaned after the previous occupants. By 11.30 I´m told the room is ready. I´m in a 6-bed dorm, the first for a while. After a quick shower I head out to phone Paola. I´m hoping to meet up with Paola and her husband, Tom, on this visit to Lima. I worked with Paola in Tralee and she´s home visiting her family with her newborn baby, Georgina. I speak to Tom on the phone and he says they´ll come into the Hostel around 2pm. Its great, I´m really looking forward seeing them. Its nice to be meeting familiar faces for once instead of the hit-or-miss nature of meeting other backpackers. It feels good.

I have 2hrs to kill before meeting the Kennedy clan and there´s an old pre-Inca temple 10 mins up the road. Its a vast temple complex with a big, central pyramid on which rituals and ceremonies took place over 1,000yrs ago. The tour of the site took about an hour. It was a beautiful sunny day and I forgot to put on suncream so I was nice and red for the arrial of Paola and Tom. This was the first time I´d seen Paola since the birth of her daughter, Georgina, so it was great to see the radiant mother again.

We took a taxi over to a seafront restaurant which Paola recommended. This place was a number of notches up from the kind of places I´ve been eating in Peru, in fact, all of South America for that matter. There was a buffet and Paola made sure I got all the best Peruvian dishes. It was gorgeous but I filled up far too quickly. Halfway through the second plate I was stuffed while Paola and Tom tucked happily into theirs. My eating habits have become a bit erratc with al the long bus journeys and bugs so it doesn´t take much to fill me up at the moment. I had to leave most of a plat behind not because I didn´t like the food but because I just could not eat anymore.

Afterwards we went over to Paoloa´s home for the evening and I got to say hello to litle Georgina. She´s a cute wee thing, still at the stage of sleeping a lot but she id wake up and gives us a big smile before announcing to her parents that it was time for food. While Georgina fed I felt it was time I should head back to the Hostel. We arranged to meet up again tomorrow evening.