Travelin’ time! The crew on their way to PERU!

After a morning that can only be described as a clusterf@%#, we were finally off to Peru! Nate woke up in time, Jacqui remembered her PIN number, and Katy didn’t claw anyone’s faces off in a fit of hunger-induced rage. So really, it was a very successful start to our travels.



After approximately a gazillion hours of traveling, we arrived in Lima! And our gazillion bags arrived too!

This is not a blog about how to pack light...

Henry, our driver, picked us up at the airport and drove us to the hostel in Lima, Magdelen House. As he began speaking in rapid, incomprehensible Spanish, we realized that we should have studied Spanish way more before leaving the states (oops). We managed to communicate enough to find out that our bus to Huancayo left the next day at 11 pm, and that he would pick us up for said bus at 10 pm. Success! We arrived at the hostel, which was much nicer than we had thought it might be (especially because Katy was having paranoid thoughts that it might be a mattress in a dungeon). We climbed 6 flights of stairs to our room for the night. The three of us shared a cozy (read: tiny) room with our own bathroom, and somehow we managed to fit ourselves and our luggage inside. We promptly passed out, Jax and Nate opting for their sleeping bags on top of their beds, and Katy constructing a cocoon out of her Craig Hospital picnic blanket.
We woke up really late on day 2, and decided to spend the day exploring Lima.


After talking to Jim, the helpful (read: pretty creepy) expatriate residing at the hostel, we decided to be super tourist-y and visit the Plaza de Armas in Lima. We took a taxi across town, where we discovered that A) Lima looks way less sketchy during the day B) Taxi drivers in Lima are CRAZY. Or rather, driving in Lima in general is crazy. It’s a lot like driving in New York, except with even more honking and no traffic lights or signs. We made it to the plaza alive, where we saw the Government Palace, the Cathedral of Lima, and a really big fountain.

We then went in search of our first authentic Peruvian meal. After an impressive sales pitch by a Peruvian waiter in the street, we decided to visit his restaurant for lunch. It was delicious, and Katy’s new Peruvian boyfriend(s) charmed her with his ability to make roses out of napkins.

After lunch, we walked around downtown Lima and checked out the shops and the massive amount of pigeons. Jacqui was especially excited about all the pigeons.

The Catedral de San Fransisco

No that's not a black and yellow striped building

We went to the Catedral de San Francisco Catacombs, where we decided it would be a really good idea to take the tour in Spanish. So basically, we had no idea what our tour guide was talking about most of the tour and we just walked around sneaking pictures despite the “No Fotos” signs.

 Underneath the cathedral, there is an underground city, “las catacumbas,” where 25,000 people were buried. And I sayinstead of “are buried” because archaeologists thought it would be a good idea to dig up all the bodies and separate them by type of bone. We walked by huge piles of human bones- skulls, femurs, scapulas- it was very organized and very creepy.

femurs and skulls

 Still, we got to pretend to be Indiana Jones for a few minutes, and it was pretty awesome. After the Catacombs, we took a taxi back to the hostel and decided to walk to the beach. But because we are really directionally challenged and it was starting to get dark, we gave up and just decided to check out the street markets nearby. We ate dinner at a small restaurant after a rave review by a random woman in the street (“¡Comida muy rica!)- she was right, it was muy delicioso. After dinner, we headed back to the hostel, packed up, and waited for Henry to take us to the bus station. We started panicking when it was 10:30 and Henry had still not arrived to pick us up, and tried talking to a hostel employee in Spanish about our predicament. There was a lot of confusion and pointing at the clock before we realized that we had accidentally set our watches an hour late for the duration of our stay in Lima, and it was actually 9:30, not 10:30. Americanos estupidos. We can’t even blame the language barrier for that one. Henry picked us up right on time, early in fact, and we made it to the bus station with plenty of time to prepare for the 8-hour ride to Huancayo.