Nice night in the hotel – good sleep – and we’re up at a decent time for our flight to Lima. No more crack of dawn mornings for us! Yippee!
Alan was right on time to pick us up and the flight was on schedule as well. We land back in Lima just as planned – and it’s just as hot as it was at the beginning of the week. Lovely! Sleeping at the Manhattan with their “air-conditioning”, read: ceiling fan, may not be so easy. Oh well!
We had asked Alan to see if we could arrange a quick city tour of Lima – and Enjoy Peru came through. We had a 4 hour tour with Rosa for $25 each. Great! Rosa picked us up right on schedule and we had a nice little city orientation tour. We saw the City square, the President’s hours, a fantastic church with catacombs – even police dressed out in riot gear with the shields and everything waiting for some protest to begin. South America. Gotta love it – as long as we’re not in the middle of it.
We drove through the elite part of town, where all the houses were enormous and pretty – and all had barbed wire strung around their outside walls and locked gates. Then back to the hotel for the rest of the afternoon. The only down side of the Manhattan is the location when you have time to kill. When you fly in at night and leave immediately the next morning – it’s a primo spot (if you don’t mind no air). It’s 15 minutes from the airport. When you have an afternoon to kill – and you don’t want to sleep – it’s a bit G.U. You can’t really walk anywhere from there – but a quick cab ride will take you to a shopping area with restaurants.
Cathy and Ed went upstairs to try to sleep. Richard and Maggi hung around, watched the local life on the square outside the room and at at the restaurant. At exactly 10:30 – our ride arrived for the airport – and we all boarded the van for our last trip together. We checked in to our separate airlines (I’m already having separation anxiety) then met up after paying our departure tax (that’s a story – every place we went you have to pay to leave! What a great revenue producer!). Ed and Cathy were hungry so they decided to eat at a restaurant off the concourse. Richard and Maggi had a drink with them, but then had a little moment of what Maggi calls as “Stevens’ panic” – and decided to head to their gate. We hugged and kissed and bade them a found farewell and safe travels. Wow – this will be so weird to travel for the rest of the trip without them!
Dinner was great –salad with grilled chicken, beer and wine and very reasonable. Well fed, but not really rested, we headed for our gate. Stopped for a beer and wine at another bar on the concourse – ran into Maggi and Richard on the way to our gate – and then boarded the first of our 3 flights to Rio.
Flights ended up being fine – we slept as much as we could on the Lima to Santiago flight. Bought some water (the cheap stuff – a nice store clerk warned us that Evian was $7 USD, but the local stuff was $1 USD), snoozed in the lounge, then boarded the Santiago to Sao Paulo flight. Again, smooth, we slept a bit and weren’t all that bedraggled when we got to Rio the next morning.
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