Markets and Mojitos

Thursday started with another early awakening and yet another shoddy breakfast! What is it with South American hotels?! Literally, a dry bread roll, nasty margarine and some jam with instant coffee. I'm aware there are starving people in the world so I'm grateful for what we get but, well, even after nearly 3 months on the road, I'd give my right arm for a bowl of Weetabix with MILK not condensed, sweetened, tinned cream!

We got some admin done, booked a few buses and hotels and then went out to discover Miraflores, the area of Lima we were staying in.

It was a beautiful day and to our surprise, it was a very pleasant area.

Once again we were led by Trip Advisor to a great restaurant ten minutes walk from our hotel that boasted the best Ceviche (Raw fish cooked only by Lemon juice, not heat) in Peru. 

They were right. It was divine. This is the mixta Ceviche including octopus, fish, squid and prawns. 

For main course we choose the seafood spaghetti, also delicious.

We'd taken the advice of numerous people on Trip Advisor and ordered 1 starter to share and one main course to share as the portions were massive! Again, they were right!

From the restaurant we headed to the local market area to look for a few things we wanted to buy, particularly some Alpaca throws that we'd had our eyes on. 

Our guest house owner said if we haggled hard enough we may be able to get them down 20-25% so we walked away incredibly proud of ourselves as we managed to negotiate a whopping 41% discount on the first price they quoted! 

We took our bounty back to Lima's answer to Fawlty Towers and went straight back out for a few drinks on the cliffs of Lima.

There were a number of restaurants and bars overlooking the sea and we enjoyed a few Mojitos whilst looking out over the bay.

At last we'd managed to stay up past midnight and at the end of the night we got a cab back to our hotel, woke up Peruvian John Cleese and made our way to our sauna-like room.

Lauren's thoughts:

I wasn't looking forward to Lima as practicality everyone we met who had been to Lima had said it was a bit of a hole. I think we managed to pick the nice part of Lima by pure fluke. Lima is a stark contrast from the rest of Peru as it is very modern and is very westernised. I haven't seen so many American chains in one street since being in Florida!

Had a lovely evening with Gareth, he is getting much better at staying out late too. I was the one dragging him home last night. At this rate, I'll be bringing back a complete party animal!