After our rural retreat in Santa Fe last week, it was time to move on to a slightly faster pace of life, our next stop was Panama City. Panama City is an interesting mix, on the one side there are the battered apartment blocks and weathered churches of the old city and on the other side the shiny skyscrapers of the new part of the city....
Panama's new city
The main attraction of the city is the world famous engineering marvel that is the Panama Canal. We went up to the Miraflores lock with the hope of seeing it in action, we just missed one ship go through when we arrived so had to wait around for three hours for the next one! But all was not lost as we wandered around the various exhibitions about the canal and then finally we saw this happen....
We appreciate that it was probably a lot more impressive in real life, but it was amazing to see how they moved the massive ships through by manipulating the water level of the canal.
Our next move after spending a few relaxing days in Panama City was Peru! We flew into Lima on Friday and the first thing we noticed was that the climate was so much cooler than Central America, so strange after two months of shorts and flip flops to be able to wear jeans!
Lima is a very cool city. When we arrived we were told that's it's always cloudy and virtually never rains! So much so that they have big water trucks driving around that city every day watering all of the trees and foliage.
Lima has a very European vibe, so our time here has felt more like a city break with walks through the park, lots of coffee and seafood, and browsing funky clothes stores.
Lima's love park
Miraflores coastline
Street art is quite popular
We almost had a disaster for our Monday funday... We accidentally drank too much on Sunday!! Oops...The beer was so cheap and we kept bumping into interesting people to chat to... What can you do hey?! But don't worry we ate some calamari and so Monday was saved.
Our next stop is Cusco. We decided to fly over as we did not fancy the 20+ hour weaving bus journey through the mountains!
The weeks highlights:
Best view: The view from the plane coming in over Peru, the snow topped mountains...
Best food: Would be rude to go to Peru's capital and not try the world famous ceviche! It's the best we've had yet! We also had the best pizza of our trip in Casco Veijo, Panama.
Ceviche, fish kebab and octopus (we didn't realise that we'd ordered octopus until it arrived as the menu was in Spanish, but actually it was nice and smoky!)
Love Monday Funday: We started off our day with a picnic in the park of love... We love a picnic at the best of times and so thought it would be a fitting start to our day.
Lima is a huge city, so big that we could not possibly see all of it in a few days, so on Monday night we took a three hour bus tour by night to take in the cities sights. A beautiful place with amazing architecture!
Random illumination
Number of hours on buses: 10
Number of hours on a plane: 3.5
Love Lisa and rach xx
No comments:
Post a Comment