Amazingly enough the girls weren`t sunburnt, but Colette had attracted a fairly amourous tambourinist who insisted on playing his tambourine on her knee by all accounts. Jen also muttered something about good looking blokes and volleyball...yeah OK, but who wants a six-pack when you can have a crate eh girls? We had a couple of beers (spot a recurring theme, they are Irish after all) and grabbed some food (me and Neil shared a meatfest again) before parting ways. It`s really weird this travelling lark in that you meet people at various stages (usually on buses) and then end up spending time together for a few days then part. In the last few weeks we`ve spent 10 days with both Mark & Lucy, and Helen & Rich, and now 4 days with Colette and Neil. Without getting all emotional you literally spend all your time together and when you part it is really quite sad as you feel all kind of on your own again. Anyhow, to the 6 of you, we miss you already, can`t wait for the big parties back home next year!

Anyway, we paid up and left (without paying the service charge of 10% due to the lack of service in the hotel - washing taking 3 days etc...) and our friendly receptionist (or not) who we`d decided was a bit shifty from day one tried to convert Real into Dollars to suit him one way and then a different price the other which meant we got shafted on the exchange rate. The bottom line was we left without paying for the washing that was 2 days late anyhow. We were just mentioning how we`d left Rio withour being robbed or scammed whilst in the taxi to the airport when we realised that in the ensuing row said shifty bugger had used the classic diversion scam and not refunded us the 50 USD for the safety deposit box...haha suckers, he was having the last laugh....so we promptly turned the cab around and went back for it...oooh the look on his face was a classic. Anyhow we got our 50 back (& I gave him 10 bucks for the laundry), and the cab only cost about a fiver more in total (we were in it for nearly 90 minutes in the end) than the hotel had quoted us for a one-way airport fee. So I guess you could say in the end we did leave Rio without any trouble (not even a sniff of it, in the centre, on the metro, on the beach, at the Maracana etc...) but we did get taxis most places.

So we pitched up at the aiport only to find ourselves behind a group of middle-aged Americans on a whistle stop´`This is the real South America, honest`tour, which was taking in Rio, Buenos Aires, Iguazu, and Macchu Picchu in about 2 days or something. These particular Americans were checking their luggage straight through from Rio to Lima (stopover like us in Santiago) so we though we`d give it a go and sleep at the airport (or, failing that, on a sofa in one of their suites) and get the flight the next morning (we presumed this is what they were doing). But no!! The (soon to be heralded a customer service God) guy at the desk told us their was a flight to Lima tonight with a whole hour connection time in Santiago, he explained the Yanks were on this, and we couldn`t check our baggage through for flights more than 8 hours apart. On the plus side it would mean we`d msis out on having to leave STGO airport, paying about 20 quid return taxis, hotel we hadn`t booked, and the departure fee (18USD each). The minus...arriving in Lima (meant to be THE scariest place in SA (maybe Colombia aside) - makes Rio look like a quaint Cornish fishing village) at 11pm with no hotel or taxi booked. What did we do, well I think you can guess, and here we are in Lima. Thanks to my brother and some woman in one of the lounges we managed to track down the hostel we`d booked for tonight (13th) and persuaded them in our (only slightly) improving Spanish we would in fact be there tonight (`este noche, si, este noche...no no manyana, este noche`....ad infinitum). The first plane journey was OK; LanChile don`t half serve some great food and the service was excellent too, shame about the legroom, but at Sau Paulo they explained that our (40 min) layover would be about 30 mins longer than expected due to having to change a wheel on the plane (we did land very very hard...). Thus we were up against it timewise. We eventually made it to Santiago though, and got to the gate literally as they started boarding...the nick of time I think they call it.

The Lima flight seemed to take an age, but we eventually made it to the airport, and after queueing for 40 mins to get through customs (we had some lady doing her best `stamp one, yawn a bit, look bored, ignore people`routine) we made it to the belt and customs, where the bags were there already and we cleared customs in record time. We headed into the arrivals lounge where there must have been 200+ touts, clamouring for business, most of them looking dodgier than a 10 day old meat pie. Thank the Lord for some bloke named Raul who had our names on a whiteboard. Thus we made it to our hostel (which is nice, cheers Coleete and Neil for rec.) and were asleep within minutes of arrival.

Having spent the morning looking around Miraflores we are pretty glad to be moving on to Nazca tomorrow, in fact we`ve already bought our tickets. Lima is smelly, dirty, and full of unlicensed taxi drivers who incessantly beep their horns touting for business...you`ve got to remember as well we`re staying in the nice area - Miraflores. To be fair the taxi drivers we have had (all booked through hostel) have all been really nice guys, and the chap at the bus terminal was too...erm straws to clutch at anyone??

A couple of other things of note, yesterday we woke up at a hotel on the Atlantic Ocean, and today we went to bed at a hotel near the Pacific. So we saw both of the world biggest oceans in a day...amazing when you think about it (unless you live near the Panama canal I guess...)

For dinner we sampled our first Peruvian fast food - Bembo`s. Although pricey, the burgers were excellent and the chips fresh and not too salty. Good effort Bembo, whoever you are. It was considerately better than Bob`s in Rio which was bloody awful. We also got to sample Inca Cola and can confirm it tastes like a mixture of coke, bananas, dr.pepper and dandelion and burdock...it was OK.

On our way to this internet cafe (we were at one earlier but the server crashed) we decided to count the number of horns that blared whilst we stopped for about 10 seconds to cross a road...the total: 11. Amazing, it´s pretty difficult to go more than a second without hearing a horn - maybe this is the road rage capital of the world.