It gripped us around the throat and slapped us hard in the face. Our first impression of Lima, Peru’s massive capital city, were not favourable. Our bus crawled painfully bumper-to-bumper through lanes of traffic jams for nearly 1.5 hours to reach the central bus terminal. Black smoke belched out from the cars and buses around us and an endless cacophony of car horns told of people’s daily frustrations. With large proportions of the city’s 8 million inhabitants crammed into shanty towns and dilapidated buildings on the outskirts of the city, the grey, unattractive urban mass sprawled in every direction. The blue skies we’d had elsewhere in Peru, had been replaced with a blanket of clouds and a chilly drizzle swept across the city from the coastline on which it sits. We noticed homeless people sleeping on the streets and shady characters hanging around on corners and, without thinking, we’d picked up our bags from the floor and were holding them tightly on our laps. If it’s true that first impressions count and you can make your mind up about someone or somewhere within the first 10 seconds, Lima would need to go on a charm offensive to win us round.
Tag Archives: Huaca Pucllana
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Torres del Paine – the ‘W’ trek
Visitors from all walks of life converge on the small hamlet of Puerto Natales to visit Chile’s and perhaps the Continent’s number one national park – Torres del Paine. Located in the Southern Patagonian ice fields at the end of the Andes, the park offers diverse wildlife and incredible mountain scenery, glaciers, lakes, rivers and […]
