Good afternoon or maybe good evening, as there is a 6 hour time difference, just wanted to welcome everyone to the blog of richard and gareth and their adventure of south america which started at 17:40 on saturday 17th march, where after, what seemed a long time in coming we were finally leaving the country on our adventure, we started by flying to madrid first on a swap over coneection to peru, after waiting in madrid with nothing to do for 2 hours we finally were on our way to are first destination, what we didn´t know was that we would be putting our lives at risk after boarding the air comet plane to peru (aka shambles r´us). I think the reason why our flights were cheap was because we were travelling on a reject plane from world warII. But after 13 hours of no leg room, watered down food, terrible children films and a few worrying turberlance minutes we arrived in sunny south america at 6:00 in the morning.

The airport was very close to our digs and so after we collected our bags we fought through a pack of on looking peruivan people who weren´t sure why 2 very white english boys had come to their country then battle through hungry taxi men eager for our business, hell of a first impression

we finally found a taxi who seemed reasonable called percy and he took us to barranco which was our first destination where our first hostel was called the point. The hostel wasn´t ready for about 3 hours as we couldn´t check in because it was 6 in the morning so with our huge backpacks and english clothes on, we struggled through barranco for 3 hours sweating like never before, but we did experince the reglious side of peru as it was palsm sunday and there were many parades and practices going on. but we fianlly got some breakfast and into our hostel which was a massive relief to dump our backpacks and just lye down for a bit.

The hostel seemed quite lively which was good as it made us interact straight away and get chatting to fellow travellers, the hostel is run by recent travellers so it suited our needs very well. free internet, recent english films, a pool table, table tennis table, some hammocks and most importantly a never ending stream of ice cold beer from the hostel bar.

The remaining of our first day we went down to the beach to have a walk around, and the city is based on a cliff so you have to walk down this old battered cobbled street with small restaurants and shops down each side, the beach is very long with fairly clean sand. there´s hardly any wind on the beach which makes the sun feel about ten times hotter, but then to cool ourselves down we did naturally what we do best, we had a beer overlooking the sea, then we had another beer, so the walk back to the hotel was a struggle as we had to walk up the cliff hill, so we stopped half way up for some food. This in lined a problem because peru is not like spain where many of the locals speak english and can help you with ordering food, so for our first meal in peru we simpley closed our eyes and picked a dish, and both dishes were fantastic.

we then ended or first day with what we both had moaned about all day some rest and more importantly some sleep, so after a couple more beers in the hostel bar an awesome aussie barbie and plenty of games of pool we decided to hit the sack and get and early night at midnight.

day 2: after a long refreshing sleep we woke upto anther day of unforgiving heat nad sunny skies (its a hard life). After a local brakfast called shakshuka which is red onions tomatoes and egg whites on a ciabatta with two egg yolks on top we were set for our first full day in lima.

After a quick walk around barranco we thought we would head down the beach for the rest of the day this was awesome but painful. once down on the beach we paid about 1.50 for two chairs and an umbrealla which wasn´t used. the beach it self was nicer than expected and turned out to be hilarious as gareth ran off with excitment to find that 5yards in the bottom of sea was covered in massive rocks his song and dance not only made me laugh but surrounding locals aswell. after that we sat back swam in the massive waves and turned from pasty white to a colour better associated with a cooked lobster, but as any good brit we ended the day on the beach with a beer in the bar with a guy from sadj who gave us the low down on peru as he had been here for over a month.

Later that night we had some grub and then headed into miraflores another area within lima this was quite an up market area. we then met up with a couple of girls which we met on the flight over and headed to an irish bar were we enjoyed some pints of green beer and lots of laughs with the local lucky charm.