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5th December
Wake up. Try to sleep for ten minutes, fall asleep kind of, repeat process for hours. I just can't sleep the night before doing something, our airport transfer was at 6am so I didn't sleep at all, woop woop! The flight itself was the usual, guy behind shoving his knees into me, Jen sleeping, average film. Flying across the continent was awesome though. The first real sights we managed to see was the vast expanse of Lake Titicaca, it's light blue waters take up almost 90km in length. It's also the 2nd highest lake in the world and yet mountains still spring up on all sides. We head there on boxing day and seeing it on ground level should be amazing!Lima is situated on the west coast, between us and New Zealand is just the Pacific Ocean and 7000 miles. Usual insane taxi driver takes us yo our hostel, ignoring common sense at every junction. We'd booked a sea view room and if you stuck your head out the window as far as possible and looked right you could just about see the sea.Lima itself is a incredibly picturesque place and breathes history and culture. It's also dirt cheap!!! After days of feeling skint we finally could eat out. And for a litre of beer it cost about £1, bonus! The locals drink a Peruvian beer called 'cristal' and it's damn good! We strolled around the old markets and streets just generally feeling happy. The streets in. South America are always fairly interesting. The varying architecture and manic drivers, herds of stray dogs and the sheer number of people who just sit outside their houses, when was the last time you wanted to do that in England?
December 6th
As we'd only arrived in Lima yesterday and have to leave tomorrow we wanted to see as much as possible of Lima in a short space of time. That can be a problem with traveling, trying to give each place enough time. It's even harder when the hostel has provided maps with no scale and the staff don't speak any English! The maps really didn't help because several streets have the same names so you can do what you like but you won't get there. A taxi virtually anywhere in Peru costs about the same price as a packet of Hubba Bubba so we gave up and hailed a cab. Lima really is a gorgeous place and the main Plaza was great, we also found a nice restaurant nearby, Jen ordered a ham salad without ham, it came with chicken instead. We dined out again that night, when you can get 2 courses and 2 beers each for £10 you might as well!
7th December
Our day started with the worst part of backpacking, repacking our bags. Even though Lima was a vast source of cliched things to do we hadn't much time before hiking the Inca trail and we had plans along the way so we had to shake a leg. I've always enjoyed Reading about anything mysterious, crop signs, conspiricies, UFO's etc so the Nazca lines were a big thing for me. I'd figured we'd just do the ground tours as the flights would be mega expensive, but thanks to the backpackers bible (lonely planet) we found out it would only cost $50 to fly over them all, sold!For the 8hr bus journey to Nazca we booked onto Cruz del sur, one of the main long haul bus companies. For £18 we got fully reclining seats, meals, films and wifi (great for the iPod touch, the fantasy team needed some tweaking!)Lima had been quite a green city so the drive to Nazca was quite a juxtaposition. The landscape resembles that of a Barron moon, devoid of all life, covered in mountains of rock and dirt. I guess because nothing I guess because Peru is so close to the Amazon I'd expected scenery similar to Brazil. We arrived in Nazca and quickly realized we wouldn't need long here. It's the Barrow-in-furness of Peru.
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