Peru - Day 1 {A Lot of Flying}

You'd think after what happened with our trip to Spain we'd learned our lesson, but we didn't. The day before we left for Peru we were running around like crazy trying to get special bug spray, clothes, luggage, and take care of all sorts of last minute items. We didn't even have a camera to take on our trip and I had to order one from Amazon and overnight it. Thank goodness it came in time! Making matters worse was the fact that the stress from final projects, finals, moving, and leaving for our trip all within a months time finally caught up with me and I felt like total crap. We stayed up most of the night and still didn't get everything done. Luckily we had a layover in Houston and were able to take care of some important things like calling our bank and credit card companies to let them know we were traveling internationally and getting some soles. Only minor details. ha!

Our flights were great and Houston to Lima was surprisingly short (5 hour 50 minutes). We got in super late and were not entirely prepared for what greeted us at the baggage claim. There was a lot going on. I had read in detail on the trip advisor forums that we could rent a cell phone for cheap near the baggage claim and "cute girls in uniform" would tell us all about it. Check. Done. Next I also read that there had been recent "express kidnapping" of American tourists by taxi drivers and that tourists should only use the official taxis arranged inside the airport before leaving the secured area. I had emailed our hotel asking that they send a taxi or shuttle (even safer) to pick us up but unfortunately they were not there (a foreshadowing for the rest of our trip). We were faced with a stressful situation when a bazillion taxi drivers mobbed us when we exited customs and looked sad after clearly not finding our names on a reserved taxi sign. Finally I saw that one of drivers had a "green taxi" badge which I remembered was mentioned as a safe, official taxi company so we went with him. Luckily he didn't kidnap us although I was worried for a bit. He did charge us more than our hotel said it should cost (another foreshadowing).

Since we were leaving early the next morning on another flight we booked a room at a hotel near the airport. The reviews said it was a good value for a place to sleep in between flights but horrible for anything else and they were right. As our taxi driver was driving us to the hotel I got worried we were being kidnapped. The neighborhood was not nice and I could have sworn the hotel was nice. It was. And we got there safe and sound and we decided to use the same taxi driver for our ride back to the airport. Our hotel printed our boarding passes for us so I was feeling pretty good about things for the next morning. After spending way too long repacking our luggage (the ecolodge we were staying at the next night told us we could only take 21 lbs each to the lodge) we finally went to bed around 1 am.