We enjoyed pretty much the first night in 3 weeks with the kids all in one room and us in another - and we even got a decent nights sleep!

We had quite a busy day today - walked down to the clifftops looking down onto the beach - not really a sand beach but looks good for surfing! The modern shopping complex was almost a welcome relief for us - we earmarked it for later visiting, the restaurants looked interesting, but we didn't stay and took a cab into the centre of Lima, to the Plaza del Armes. The centre of town is nicer than we had been advised, and we enjoyed having a wander around the old town buildings. Finn loved the idea of 2 tanks on the corners of the square guarding the Palace, and he & Derry managed to chase their fair share of pigeons too. We had the most enormous lunch at a chicken restaurant and even Finn couldn't win his bet of finishing off the chocolate cake portion. It took us so long to eat it we were a bit delayd on the next part of the plan - a visit to the gold museum.

Well worth a visit, this is the private collection of someone whose name escapes me but who used to hunt with Ernest Hemmingway. Anyway, apart from some scandal a few years back where over 50% was claimed & verified to be fake, there are still some 20,000 military and 6,000 genuine gold artefacts. We took a guide for an hour, which was just enough to keep the kids nearly interested! We learnt all about the Andean cross, and as luck would have it there was a shop selling them close by !

We returned to the beach on request, where, in the fading light and just next to the expressway, the kids managed a few relay races in the sandy part (man made for kids to play in!) with a backdrop of surfers, sunset ad pelicans!

We visited the shopping complex spied earlier in the day - no chance of evading it - and found the Victorinox shop so the critical penknife shortage was rectified! We ate in the funky chair restaurant, then wandered back to the hotel ready for the morning transfer to Cusco. We've already planned our next trip, we're going to a detox centre, since the daily intake of fizzy drinks and multiple 'prepared' (restaurant and/or cafe usually) food intake is taking its toll, especially with no activity to increase the heart rate. I guess it's a byproduct of not having a fixed base to shop from and move to a self-catering way of life where we could control diet a bit better. So we're going to try to change the eating habits a bit to keep us at least partially from deteriorating rapidly!