A tearful arrival in Peru

Up before the sun this morning, we caught an early taxi to the airport, checked ourselves in, went through immigration and headed for our gate. Although we got to the airport over an hour before our flight, it took nearly that long to get through the slow lines, so we didn´t have to wait long before boarding. The flight from Santiago to Lima is just under 4 hours, and was uneventful. But we do enjoy LAN Chile, they´re a great airline.

We arrived in Lima around 11:30 in the morning. We quickly and easily got through immigration and customs, and caught a Urbanito bus from the airport into the city. It took much longer than it should have because there was a huge protest march going on in Central Lima near the Centro Civico (Civic Centre), maybe something about labour relations. We´re not too sure, but there were hundreds of people. We finally got to our hotel, the Hotel Espana, a huge old mansion converted into a hostel. It´s a really cool building with tons of different levels, and countless rooms. Throughout the hostel are statues, paintings, mummified skulls and all sorts of wierd parephenalia. Our room was graced with not one but 4 paintings of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Cristo. So happy to be in a Catholic country!

We wandered around the Plaza de Armas just nearby and passed the San Francisco monastery, which has underground catacombs with 70,000 people buried there! We were going to go in, but didn´t want to hassle with the large numbers of school groups lining up. The buildings around the Plaza are very old and beautiful. Something was going on in the centre of the plaza, as they were setting up scaffolding and there were many armed police officers in riot gear on every corner. We walked through a pedestrian mall towards a bus station to buy some tickets. On the way, we passed what we think were the remnants of a small bomb that had been let off on a hand cart full of smoldering rags and splintered wood. Our suspicions may have been correct as we saw the explosives unit from the police force pass by as we walked away. The station we arrived at was the wrong station so we took a taxi to the right one. It was just near where the marches were earlier, and the crowds had cleared out. We bought tickets to head south tomorrow, then took a taxi back to the hotel where we relaxed a bit, used the internet, and called Nigel´s dad for his birthday.

For dinner we headed back to the Plaza and down the pedestrian mall. Looking for something cheap, we wound up at a local burger place. As we stood waiting for our meal, I began to sneeze. Then Nigel began to sneeze. We looked around and soon everyone was sneezing. Within minutes we were coughing, our throats were burning, and my eyes were stinging and watering. We rushed outside but it was even worse. People were still about, and there was a group forming with lit candles. Not sure what to do, we went back into the restaurant. Our food was shortly ready, we asked for it to go and got out of there. It turns out (we think) that the police had let off some tear gas, maybe to prevent riots or disperse the crowds nearby. We quickly headed back to our hotel, unscathed but a tiny bit alarmed. We ate our meal (which was darn good) and went to bed around 7:30, the social butterflies that we are.