Beautiful Lima

After a day of travel from Rio via a very wet Sao Paulo, we arrived an hour late in Lima, and got to our hotel in the very nice beachside suburb of Miraflores at 12.30am.  We were warned not to put toilet paper down the toilet lest it bung up the plumbing, but apart from that the hotel is very nice.
In the morning today we did a city tour and it is fair to say that everyone on the tour was quite surprised at the beauty of this city. 

Nobody had much idea what to expect, but we did not anticipate the cleanliness of the buildings and streets and the array of beautiful gardens, in a city that averages 9mm of rain per year.  That's right - just 9mm; a third of one inch on the old scale.   Our tour guide said he had never seen any more rain than just a few drops on the ground.  The 9mm comes from mist and fog which shroud the city continuously for 4 months in the winter.  Today we had half fog and half blue sky -  when the fog came in the temperature was quite cool.   Lima is at the same latitude as Darwin, yet because of the cold Humboldt sea current coming up from below Chile, and the influence of the Andes, the temperature rarely gets above 27, and the ocean temperature never gets above 15 degrees!

All the trees and flowers are watered by hand, and the lawns by sprinklers, with water that comes from large dams in the Andes,  The tour guide said there had only been one period of water restrictions, when it stopped raining in the Andes for a few months. 

 We had a delicious lunch,  then walked around the expensive looking shops where everything seems cheaper than in Oz:clothes, tv's, cameras etc.  We then walked down to the beachfront with 4 others from the tour at night and felt completely safe, eating in an upmarket shopping centre overlooking the Pacific.  The food in South America we have found to be excellent and the variety is streets ahead of Europe.  

We only have the one day in Lima, which everyone has agreed is too short.  We could have spent one less day in Rio instead.
We leave for the Peruvian Amazon tomorrow which promises to be very hot and sticky, in a jungle lodge with no electricity.  We have started taking our anti-malaria tablets.  So no blogs for a couple of days.  Until then.
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