Lima

I arrived in Lima on Saturday morning after a very luxurious 16-hour overnight bus journey from Arequipa. I travelled up here with Markus, who I met in the hostel in Arequipa, and we both decided to stay at Red Psycho Llama hostel in Miraflores, a suburb of Lima near the ocean. By the way, if you're wondering about the hostel's name, it's because the hostel has an eco-friendly theme, and the name is a very rough approximation of the word 'recycle'.

On Saturday I was feeling quite a lot better than I did on Friday, but I still wasn't fully recovered, so I decided to have a fairly lazy day and stay in Miraflores. In the morning I walked down to the beach (below), where there were a lot of surfers enjoying the waves.

We'd discovered when we arrived that the hostel was celebrating its second birthday that evening, and all of the guests were invited to a party at the owner's parents' house in a nearby Lima suburb. Markus and I decided to go along, but we didn't plan to stay very long because both of us were a bit ill. Anyway there were free pisco sours to drink, and for food there were anticuchos, which are a traditional Peruvian dish consisting of skewered meat served with boiled potato and sweetcorn. If I'd known at the time that the meat was actually cow's heart, I'm not sure if it would have stopped me eating it, but I might not have gone back for seconds.

We ended up staying at the party a bit longer than expected, and at around midnight some of the hostel employees told us that they were going to a disco back in Miraflores. Having had a few too many pisco sours by that point, we decided to go along to that as well, and we ended up not getting back to the hostel until after 2am. So much for getting an early night.

The following day I managed to drag myself out of bed at about 10am, and I felt well enough to make the journey into the centre of Lima. I'd read in Lonely Planet that a new bus system was about to be introduced, linking Miraflores with the rest of Lima, so I decided to go and see if it was up and running yet. I discovered that the southern part of the bus system had recently opened, which was enough to get me into the centre, and best of all it was still in a testing phase, which meant that all journeys were free of charge.

I went straight to the Museo de Arte de Lima, which had only recently reopened after a multi-million dollar revamp. There were three exhibitions there, including one of photographic portraits by Mario Testino, who I never knew was Peruvian, and born in Lima. I then walked to the Plaza de Armas, where I saw the Cathedral and the Palacio de Gobierno, the home of Peru's president. I also visited the Monasterio de San Francisco, whose catacombs contain thousands of human remains in some interesting arrangements.

On Monday I went to Huaca Pucllana, which is an adobe pyramid in Miraflores dating from around 400AD. They had a small farm there, as well as a few Peruvian hairless dogs running around. I then went back into the centre of Lima, where I visited the Museum of the Spanish Inquisition, and I also went to Chinatown, which was strangely devoid of Chinese people.

I'm now spending an unscheduled fourth day here in Lima, because it's a good place to relax (it has lots of Western comforts, including branches of Pizza Hut, McDonalds, Burger King, KFC and Dunkin' Donuts within three minutes' walk of the hostel, not that I would ever go to those, of course...). It's also nice not to be freezing cold at night, although Lima rarely gets very hot either, being almost constantly blanketed in cloud.

Tomorrow I'll be moving on to Huaraz, which is another town in the mountains. To be honest at this stage I'm just a little bit tired of mountains, but I'm told these are really good ones, so they're probably worth a couple of days of my time.