Beach Baby

So there was a trip to Machu Pichu, which despite being inundated by thousands and thousands of tourists, was very impressive. (Angkor Wat may have ruined the cities of every other ancient civilization for me to be quite honest, but it was cloud-covered, green, and crazy to imagine a city up so high on the hills.) Then a final short morning in Cusco, a last minutes dash to the airport, of course only to find that our flight was delayed. There are thousands of bus companies with buses that run up to the beaches near the Ecuadorian border, our final stop on our trip, but they all have separate bus terminals all over Lima, a notoriously large and dangerous city. As the afternoon wore on, it became clear that we were going to miss the one bus we knew about, which we were told had big comfortable sleeping beds, key to a 16 hour bus ride. We got a list of other companies from the tourist info desk in the airport and sucked up the $13 dollar cab ride to the one that seemed the most likely to have evening buses going vaguely in the direction we wanted to go. We got to see some of the slums of Lima, and its true that Lima has some very poor sectors, but we also got to see some of the center of Lima and some of the 19th century architecture. Stuck in traffic in front of a different bus terminal, I looked in at the board showing departures and we realized that this company had a bus going directly to Mancora, our planned destination in only an hour. We hopped out of the cab and were soon on our way.

Today we spent all day on the beach and I got sunburned on the back of my legs. I was thinking how I´ll need to be draped in my sarong all day tomorrow, which reminded me of beach trips from days past. My travel partner Lindsay got a big kick out my memories of the time at the beach with my parents when I got sunburned and I had to wear a white turtleneck under my little red bathing suit. I really did look like a geek. Somewhere there are photos.