Lima, buses, and butter-fingers

After our last couple days in Guayaquil were spent on the beach in Salinas enjoying ceviche, treating ourselves to a movie at the local mall on a rainy afternoon, eating some fresh bakery items and some mystery meat on a stick, we were staring down the barrel of a 26-hour bus ride to Lima, Peru. While I am the first to admit that a full day of non-stop travel isn´t exactly my cup of tea, it is about 1/4 the price and would allow us to see some of the countryside between our two destinations. It was a double-decker affair with large, nearly-fully reclining seats, movies, meals included and air conditioning. Theoretically.

The bus was indeed large, the seats reclined nearly flat at the expense of your leg room, the movies were a mixture of English-drowned-out-by-the noise-of-the-bus and Spanish subtitles, the meals were only mildly disgusting, and the AC worked about 15% of the time. The company also claimed that all of the border-crossing documentation could be handled ¨on the bus¨ which apparently meant that they drive you to the border so you can get out of the bus, stand in the immigration line for an hour, then get back on the bus. Maybe ¨on the bus¨ was lost in translation. All told, it was not a great experience. On the bright side, there was plenty of scenery including some harrowing cliff-side driving, sprawling desert edging up the pounding surf and the rolling foothills of the Andes mountains.

We are staying at a place in Lima called the Hostal España, a mansion-sized affair with classical artwork, sculptures, a rooftop restaurant overlooking a large plaza, a large turtle wandering around the restaurant, 4 or 5 kittens chasing each other around the rooftop area, free internet (sort of, more on that later), our own bathroom, hot showers, and cable TV. It is one of the cheaper accommodations we´ve found so far, and one of the nicest as well - a perfect chaser to the marathon bus.

So the internet was free, until our trusty laptop slipped out of my hand and crashed to the floor this morning. After a little troubleshooting, I am working on getting a temporary operating system installed until we can get a more permanent fix. The hard drive is completely non-responsive, so the full-resolution pictures we had saved there are possibly gone. Kind of a bummer, but I will have to do some recon when we return to the states and see if I can get them off. I had a secondary hard drive I brought along for spare storage, so hopefully I can get it up and running so we will have our own PC again.

We´re in Lima for another day, then hopping a cheap flight to Puno, Peru to check out Lake Titicaca on Saturday. We´ll likely be there for a few days before heading into Bolivia and Brazil. We will also likely have internet (provided I can get our PC up and running again) along the way, and will try to get some more pics up as well. Farewell until then.