A Big Grey Desert

…And Peru is ugly! We came in from the North and have hugged the coast all the way down to Lima and beyond. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Well, you’d be wrong. The whole thing is a huge, dry, barren desert.

And not even desert in the fun big-heaps-of-yellow-sand way; this stuff is grey and dusty and seeps into your clothing so before long you end up looking like a Dickensian extra. The sea moves between being as flat as a mirror, with no clear divide between its dull grey expanse and the dull grey cloudy expanse of the sky, so it looks as though boats are smply floating in mid-air, to turbulent and blustery.

And it’s still cold of course. Can’t be forgetting the cold.

I think I like Peru much less than Ecuador, even though we were only in the former for a week and we have a month here. Hopefully at some point we will see some green things, but after hundreds of kilometers of grey I am beginning to give up hope slightly. Still, the locals are interesting, and have ingenious ways of trying to nick baggage (lying on the floor ‘asleep’ on overnight coaches and running their hands under the seats is a new one on me).

Oh, and L’s sister has joined us, so we all feel a bit better about our Spanish and quite excited at getting to show her things we had gotten a little bit too used to. I sort of feel bad now that the first hostel we took her to was full of cockroaches, with no lights in the bathrooms and a big metal grille you had to hammer on to be allowed out.

Trujillo, Peru - Greg