Thorsten and Suzi 28/09/06

Good news and bad news I`m afraid. Good news first. We have safely arrived in Peru and even got food on our 5 hour American Airlines flight down from Miami. They are still officially the worst airline we have flown with (having to buy our own food on the 5 hour flight San Francisco to New York, just because it was internal, was somewhat of a suprise!) but landed safely and our hostal was waiting for us at the airport. We will never again under-estimate the feeling of relief you get when you see your name scribbled on a piece of paper on arriving somewhere for the first time!

We stayed in Miraflores and enjoyed walking round and down to the beach and looking round central Lima for our first couple of days. We watched changing of the guard at the Government Palace and was really fun. It is ceremonial only and there was even a band playing along with the marching troops to keep the tourists happy. We also visited the communications museum (which was fascinating, found out the incas had a really efficient postal system too, with messengers, called chasquis, who could not read or write, running 7km "blocks" through the Andes to pass messages orally from the source to the recipient. Really impressive!) and San Francisco church and monestary. The latter has one of the only catacombs open to the public in South America and so we enjoyed a lovely half hour looking at the piles of bones discovered of the 25,000 people who were buried there in the 17th century.

On Tuesday, we headed off to Pisco by bus, intending to work our way via Nasca to Cusco overland. Now the bad news. Unfortunately, on arriving at Pisco, we discovered that Thorsten`s rucsac had been taken. We had both little rucsacs above our heads in the rack but it was evidently not close enough, someone had still managed to take it. Was just such a shame as it contained, amongst other things, our budget book and Thorsten`s passport, which had all the country stamps to date in it, and which we were both so sad to lose as they served as a written record of all our experiences to date. We also lost about 150 pounds in cash, travellers cheques and Thorsten`s air ticket. I know it probably sounds funny but didn`t care about the money half as much as those things with sentimental value that had gone.

So, off we went to the police station in Pisco and filed a report. We managed it between us, albeit nowhere near perfect, wholly in Spansh, so were thanking our lucky stars for the last 4 weeks in Anigua or we would have been stuck! We then had no choice but to come back to Lima as the German Embassy has no other consulates where we could get Thorsten a new passport. 7 hours on a bus and ended up back at the youth hostal where we started!! We then spent yesterday getting the new passport, getting a new entry stamp from Peruvian immigration and getting new travellers cheques. Today we are off to pick up the new air ticket and buy a new rucsac so we`re ready to head off again. Really sadly, as we were both looking forward to seeing the world`s biggest colony of sea lions and the Nasca lines very much, we no longer have time to make it anywhere else and have to go straight to Cusco tomorrow to aclimatise before the inca trail next week. Never mind, there`s plenty more years left in us to make it back one day!

So, all has worked out ok and we are grateful in a way the bag was just taken and we were not hurt in any way in the process. Thorsten`s new passport photo is also one of the best we have ever seen so he is happy with that!! Still, feeling a bit sad about the stuff we have lost and holding a very small bit of hope that maybe the thief will have taken the money and dumped the bag, which may one day work it`s way back to us. Always look on the bright side of life!!

Off to BA now but will write again really soon with a quick update of our last few days in Guatemala.