Greg and Becky

Buenos Dias!

Beck and I are sitting in an internet cafe in the city of Arequipa, Peru.

We´ve been traveling since Wednesday and it´s been a good, but challenging, trip so far. We arrived in Lima at two in the morning, to find out Air Canada had lost out luggage. We bummed around lima for the next two days in the same clothes we put on to board the plane. We bought some new skivies at the Peruvian depatment store, Ripley´s, so we didn´t smell too bad.

Lima is an interesting, but overwhelming city. It´s constantly in motion and the taxi drivers drive like they have a death wish. There´s a lot of political unrest in Peru right now, so there were soldiers and police everywhere in Lima. Armored cars with machine guns and lots of police carrying batons ringed the Plaza Aramas down town. There was a pretty big march on our second day there, but it seemed fairly peaceful. We´d post some pictures, but this computer won´t let us. We´ll try tomorrow.

We hung around Lima for two days. We saw a little folk concert with a choir of like 10 people and a few guitarists and drummers in the middle of a park in Miraflores. They were playing Peruvian folk songs and the crowd was singing and dancing along. Very cool.

We flew to Arequipa yesterday. The airport doesn´t even have gates. We walked down those stair things on to the tarmac. The weather here feels like heaven. It was cold, overcast and damp in Lima. Down here it is warm enough for short sleeves in the afternoon, although it gets quite chilly at night.

The unrest continues throughout Peru. There was a candle light march last night around the main square of Arequipa, with a few hundred protesters participating. They´ve blocked roads all over the region, so we´ve had to cancel out trips out to the Colca Canyon and down to Lake Titicaca. We´ve talked to travelers who´ve been stuck for up to a week on the wrong side of roadblocks. We´re heading to Cusco on Tuesday by air, so barring any major striking we should be fine.

Rock and Roll!