Landing and sleeping

Flew for 13 hours from SF to Lima with a 2hr stop over in Houston. Pretty uneventful flight. Two little boys were sitting behind us on the plan on the way over. They were really quite good considering how long the flight was and how excited they were to be on a plane. The one little boy was literely giddy as we touched down.

We arrived in Lima Int’l at 11pm and for the next hour tried to make our flight arrangements to Aniquipa. All the flights on all of the National airlines (LAN, Peru Star and GoGo?) were fully booked.

Changing plans on the fly

We had planned on doing the circuit called the Gringo trail that runs south of Lima. We were planning on doing it counter clockwise since this would give us a better chance to adjust to the altitude. But as luck would have it there were flights to Cusco and rather than lose a valuable day we decided to do the circuit clockwise rather than lose a day sitting around in Lima waiting for a plane.

Cusco is at 3326m so there is a lot of people that rush there from Lima end up with altitude sickness. Daph and I had gone to the travel clinic before hand and got some altitude sickness pills to help deal with the altitude. As soon as we booked our flight to Cusco we started gobbling the altitude pills.

We headed over to our hotel in Mira Flores. A high end area of town near the water. Lima has a population of more than 8M people so it pays to pick the area you stay in carefully.  The hotel was very nice and neighbourhood was great. The only down side was the fact that it was a 30 min cab ride to the airport. This meant that we got to the hotel at around 1am and had to leave the next morning at 6am to catch our morning flight.