We have now been in South America for a month and there have been times when we haven`t been on a tour and had to fend for ourselves. We have bought many bottles of sparkling water by accident, we have used a sign for a one way street as a guide to get home and were beeped at by pretty much every taxi that went by in case we wanted one. Our memories of scattered days in Santiago, Lima and Quito are as follows....
In Santiago we only had half a day, but still managed to catch up on some tv! Here is a random Norwegian film that we found which looked largely terrible. Particularly strange as almost all the channels were in Spanish.
This was the only other photo we took, is it a person yawning or is it a heater, you decide...
Onto Lima and we found this guy very entertaining, he had a sign for us and later found out his only job was to stand at the airport meeting G Adventures tourists and take them to a taxi...which might explain his facial expression. Christine was very excited to see her name up in lights...
After the Inca Trail we met up with Helen and Jonathan from our Inca Trail and Amazon tours in a steak restaurant called Panchita. We ended up eating here 3 times as it was so good, 350g steak (250g for the ladies), potato, corn and bread, a staple diet in Peru.
Lots of funky street paintings that impressed Christine. Here are a couple...
Before the Galapagos Islands we had a couple of days in an awesome self catering room with views over a mountain in Quito. We had a balcony as you can see which was great when the sun was out and Liverpool weren't on tv. It also had free laundry which was a luxury!
and it had sunrises!
Downtown Quito, note to self when you walk down a hill you have to walk back up again! A task made more difficult by dodgy pavements covered in loose cables!
On our flight back to Lima from Quito we passed over some pretty impressive mountains (or volcanoes, without a guide we were useless! It looks a bit like Mount Fuji to me, see blog post 2!).
and valleys...
Back in Lima in Miraflores where we stayed each time we visited, we saw many paragliders over the coast.
They also had this statue which we later found out was a park to mark love. As you can see, they also put up these tasteful Christmas decorations the third time we visited Lima.
This guy was Christine's favourite, he was found opposite a restaurant we went to...not sure entirely why he was there!
Due to the nice weather it seemed that everyone went outside in the evening, particularly to the park. Below is someone walking on a tightrope but others would go running, play football and even use the outside gym.
Coastal shot of Miraflores...
During our time in South America we started to realise that Christmas was almost upon us, which felt strange given the heat outside.
Here is HSBC santa, they went a bit overboard perhaps in getting santa to visit.
On our last night in Lima we visited a fountain park which had 13 in total including the Worlds biggest at 80m (it didn't look as high as the Bellagio though and looked a bit like the one in Geneva, perhaps they should complain...) The below photo is of a much more impressive one, it had fountains all at the same time with lasers and a video put over the top..as well as some music.
They also had this on which was a water walkway that you can walk down, it was hard to get a photo at the start...either that or Christine made a new friend!
Back to Santiago for about 12 hours, this time we made an effort and went for a walk through town. We found a vibrant plaza where the below were taken. We don't actually know what they are but were nice all the same!
and lots and lots of people playing chess on a Friday night!
Thats about it from South America as we finish our 3 month journey. Hopefully a couple of blog posts to go to arrive shortly when we get the underwater pics back. All that is left is to decide if this was us paragliding into the sunset......
It wasn't but was a nice picture!
