Peru.2

Aaaand back in Peru, which I think we've decided is our new favorite country. We will definitely be coming back here. We got into Lima and rested a bit from our early morning flight before hitting up the town again. This time we wandered down to some ruins that are right in the heart of the city. Apparently they have been relatively recently discovered as well. One of the guides there mentioned that his father used to play on these hills until the discovered that underneath the hills were actually pyramids made of clay bricks hundreds of years old! The brick work was pretty fascinating. The people that made these ruins were actually who Lima was named after (the Lima tribe). It was crazy to see these ancient ruins in the middle of a modern city. They are still doing a lot of excavations so maybe in a few more years there will be even more to see!

We spent the rest of the day wandering around the coastline. We went to the Parque del Amor (park of love) and watched parasailers flying over the coastline. We also got some more delicious food...and more food...

The next morning we had to get up bright and early for a tour I had booked. I use the word tour a bit loosely since really it was just a private chauffer for the day to take us to a few places outside of the city because driving in Peru is a bit dicey. They picked us up at 4:30am and the guide was full of information. Apparently he was a 21 year old working his way through college for restaurant management and tourism. One of the reasons I wanted to book one of these tours was because the company is actually a non profit who uses the proceeds of the tours to help the slum areas of Lima. We started off our day (after 3 hours of driving) with a boat ride out to Islas Ballestas...the mini Galapagos Islands. Its a huge bird sanctuary island off the coast of Peru. We even got to see a bunch of little humbolt penguins!

After the boat ride we grabbed lunch in town and again...it was fabulous. I don't think I would ever get sick of Peruvian food. After lunch we drove another hour or so in the Ica desert. There's a little oasis in the middle of sand dunes that has a little town built up around it. I'm super glad we went there now because apparently it's about to become super popular and have a few big hotel chains moving into the area. For now, there's just a bunch of locals and hippie backpackers. we hopped on a dune buggie that whisked us off into the ocean of sand. We road up and down the dunes and even got to try out a little sand boarding. These were some super steep dunes...so clearly there was a lot of screaming going on on my part ;)

Our ride home was great, our guide gave us some incite on how a lot of Peruvians live. Apparently if you have a home in a place for 15 years, you then own the land. So we saw a lot of little shanty towns that were unoccupied and he said people are setting up empty houses (sometimes just a few pieces of wood slapped together) to claim land for moving there in the future. It was so strange. Also apparently people leave rebar sticking out on the top of their walls so their house appears to be under construction still so that they don't have to pay taxes. Really strange. We made it back to Lima and killed a few hours drinking delicious cocktails across the street from our hotel before getting a ride back to the airport. 20 hours later we were back in sunny Seattle ready for more summer adventures ;)

Chile

We hopped a flight from Cusco to Santiago, Chile and got in in the wee hours of the morning. For some reason it didn't really cross my mind that it was a different time zone, but turns out it was about 2 hours ahead of time from Peru...which is on East Coast time. So that put us at about 4am Chile time for getting to our hotel to check in. Clearly we were in need of a few hours of nap time before we did anything productive. We ended up spending most of the day walking through the city and wandering up a hillside park that had great views of the city...and awesome playgrounds!

Heading down from the park we took the tram down which was literally almost straight down the cliff. Definitely saved some time and energy after walking up it. We ended up in a cute little restaurant area of Santiago just in time for supper. After wandering around a bit we ended up at a little wine bar. We asked the waiter for suggestions on good Chilean wine and he brought the Owner/Sommelier out who spoke English. Turns out he also spent half his childhood growing up in Birmingham, AL at a high school that we know a lot of people from! Super random. He also was really good at suggesting wines and we ended up with a Chilean Pais. He also recommended some fabulous food, gave us a little Chilean wine history, and some recommendations of places to go in Valparaiso the next day!

After dinner, we decided to spend the evening enjoying the fabulous rooftop pool at the Ritz. We pretty much had the place to ourselves, and the bar tender brought us beverages in the hot tub, it was quite divine.

The next day (I don't even remember what days they were at this point...) we got a little bit of a late start before heading out to the bus stop and hopped on a bus to Valparaiso. Busses left for there every 20 minutes or so it seamed like, so we were able to jump on one really easily. I may have slept through most of the bus ride, but I did see a few mountains and tunnels that we went through on the way. We got to Valparaiso and I had a vague idea of where our hotel was so we just started walking. The streets were strangely empty and we soon found out why. As were kept walking our eyes started to burn and water and we couldn't stop sneezing...there was definitely residual tear gas in the air! Turns out the president of Chile was there earlier giving a speech and riots broke out and they were all gassed away. So we got there just in time to walk through a desolate tear gas filled downtown Valparaiso...not an awesome start. After consulting the GPS, we finally found our hotel which was up the hill from the downtown area in a super cute area! This is where Valparaiso started getting good!

After checking in, we started out with drinks on the roof deck while watching the sunset over the city. This hotel was pretty awesome and the views were amazing!

We spent the rest of the evening wandering around the hill checking out the AMAZING street art. It was everywhere.

The next day went about the same. We wandered even farther and onto other hills in the city checking out the amazing street art. It was so exciting to turn every corner to find out what's you'll see each time!

We spent one more night there before catching a bus back to Santiago and spending a couple of more nights around that area. We checked out the historic area of the city and did a lot more wandering and caught up on a little relaxing too.