When we finally made it to sea level - Lima

After leaving the high altitutueds and coming back to the coast I FINALLY start to feel like myself again, wihoo!

 

I don't know if a big part of me feeling better is a placebo effect since I am convinced that it's the altitude that's been giving me all that bad luck, but whatever it is it's good cause I felt like myself again after just a few hours in Lima.

We decided to cheat the fashion backpacker style and take a flight from Cusco to Lima and it saved us a lot of time. I almost screamed when we finally saw the ocean and the coastline. It felt like we'd been away from the sea for ages and it was like seeing a long lost friend again.

We only had a couple of nights to spend in this massive capital so we didn't have time to do that much. I think you'd need like a metro card to be able to see as much of the city as possible, but we limited ourselves to explore just a tiny bit by walking.

We stayed in an area called Chorrillos, which is meant to be a quite area and it's the area next to the more touristy areas of Barranco and Miraflores. Getting there from the airport was pretty hard though, I mean without getting scammed. There are no buses going from the airport, so if you want to take a bus you first have to take a taxi downtown and take the bus from there, same thing with the metro. So the only option really is to take a taxi and prepare to get ripped of. Even though there's a sign in the airport with prices for taxis to all the different areas, it's massively overpriced. To Churrillos it said that it would cost 80-65 soles and of course all the taxi drivers said that we'd had to pay 80, finally we ended up getting one for the lower price of 65, but it's still ALOT of money for a taxi here.

So after that we decided to use our legs and walk the way from Churillos to Barranco to find somewhere to eat, and it didn't take long, only 20 mins or so, and we found this vegetarian restaurant that is in like a train waggon; El Cultural Restaurant Express. It looked really cool, but was a bit disappointing vegan-wise and amount-of-food-for-what-you-pay-wise.

Guy ordered a pizza for 15 soles which looked like a pizza for a baby and there weren't many vegan options at all, so I only had a avocado salad which kept me full for like an hour so on our way back we had to buy popcorn to make us feel better.

Barranco is a really beautiful area, I think it's better than Miraflores which is crazy busy. But then again, there also seem to be a lot more stuff going on in Miraflores. 

Because we stayed in Churrillos we found an accommodation which wasn't too expensive. We looked and looked for decent places to stay around Barranco and Miraflores, but almost everything was out of our budget. So I'm glad we extended the search so that we could find Paipo Bed Breakfast and Surf - because this was truly a great accommodation! It was clean and tidy, good breakfast included (vegan margarine and bread!!) and the stuff were great. We especially loved the owner who even offered us a ride down to Miraflores in his car so we didn't have to walk all that way in the heat.

In Miraflores we went to the first vegan restaurant that had popped up on Happy Cow (there were LOADS of places to choose between from here, but all of them seems to be a bit expensive) - El Jardin de Jazmin. 

This restaurant looked much cooler and nicer than either the staff or the food was. I hate to get disappointed in vegan restaurants, but it wasn't great. The food was pretty average and again, you didn't get a decent amount of food either, especially since it wasn't cheap either we expected to at least walk out and feel full. Yes, there seems to be a pattern in the veggi restaurants in Lima!

But it still taste good. Guy had the lentil burger which he really liked and I had what was supposed to be a combo with aubergine steak and quinoa salad and a lemonade for 19 soles. And yeah, it was good. Not great.

After all the food fail where we had to go somewhere else to get full afterwards, we gave up and in our last night we created our own dinner, which is the best dinner we've had in Lima; wholwheat bread, avocado, olives and Oreos from the local supermarket in Churillos. 

What a feast eh!

We felt ready to leave Lima pretty quickly and got on the bus the next day at 13:30, which was gonna be our home for the next 19 hours, waived goodbye to Lima and feeling really excited about spending our last days in Peru in the little beach town of Mancora.