Lima and Arequipa

after being sold dodgey plane tickets, we finally made it to Lima, a beautiful city with hot water, refrigerated dairy and clean streets! Ahhhh blissss. we spent most of the 5 days in Lima just relaxing, eating out at some amazing restaurants and doing the tourist thing! Unfortunately we never found a good Peruvian wine, but we´re seriously looking forward to Chile and Argentina now!

we took in a show - traditional dance in traditional costumes... some of them were just amazing! i got pulled up on stage twice, but more as comic relief than anything else. one of the dances involves pinning a handkerchief to your backside and chasing each other with candles to try to set the other alight... i was happy to chase him with a candle, but there was no way i was letting him pin a flammable cloth to my backside!

We celebrated chris´ birthday in Lima with Parapenting (aka paragliding) - it was incredible! we were strapped to a guy with a massive parachute and told to run off the edge of the cliff... yep! just run and jump! every part of your body is telling you to stop running because there is a cliff face in front of you.. but you really have no choice. it was awesome! floating down the cliff face, along the beach of Miraflores, back up along the main road, we got so close to the apartment buildings that i could have touched them! then just before landing he pulled us into some tight turns and i completely lost my stomach!

We ventured onto Arequipa, an amazingly beautiful town with cobble stone streets winding their way around monstrous catholic churches (i even managed to drag chris into a couple). so far, i think Arequipa has had the best local cuisine; they stuff chillies and capsicums with meat or vege concoctions! and we tried ostrich and alpaca, which is surprisingly a white meat, and delicious (sorry ann). the hostel we stayed at was just a party town! they had this awesome life size Jenga game... you know the one where you pull the wooden blocks out from the bottom and re-stack them on the top, same same, but with massive wooden blocks, crash helmet for safety, and pisco shots as penalty for breaking any one of the numerous ridiculous rules! hilarious! and made even more interesting by the fact that our hostel had lost power, so we played by candel light.