This trip will be a lot of stops, ranging from one night to three. Lima is only two nights, but our 7:00am arrival yesterday effectively gave us two full days to see the city. Which is not nearly enough, in my opinion. It’s a big city of about 13 million people, with many different areas and things to do. Yesterday was completely unplanned, while today was mostly planned.

After another breakfast at the hotel, we met our guide Miguel and driver Jose for a City Tour. This was to cover the old central part of the city. Lots of government buildings, churches and walking through the streets.

Peru has a robust middle class, but like all countries, also a group that is very poor. The average per capita income GDP is about $11,000, which you can double when adjusted for the cost of living here. That latter number would be about 21% of the US. Miraflores and Barranco, where we spent yesterday, are solidly middle and upper class. But from where we were today, you can see examples of the extreme poverty some endure.

As with most large cities, there is an active street life. We saw businessmen having a meeting on the street, a school trip, artists working and lots of security and police.

Our travel agent got the message that we didn’t want to tour any museums, but apparently missed the part about churches. So we hit two big churches, one of which is the Lima Cathedral. The second, especially, was quite impressive. Among other things, it contains the tomb of Francisco Pizarro, we vaguely remembered from our grade school history studies of the colonization of the Americas by the European powers 500 years ago. There is also lots of art. An interesting aspect is the depiction of Christ adapted to local culture.

At the end of the four hour tour, Miguel and Jose dropped us at El Mercado, a restaurant that our travel agent had booked for us. We’re usually a bit concerned about restaurant reservations like this; travel agents and hotel concierges like to recommend relatively fancy places. But we’re not fancy restaurant people. El Mercado was a pleasant surprise – lively, casual yet very nice. The staff was very accommodating and the food was fresh and good.

While we were touring with Miguel, I got a text from our hotel asking us if we wanted to schedule our complimentary massages. We didn’t know we had any complimentary massages. But after an exchange of texts with the lady from the spa, we arranged for a 4:00pm appointment for the two of us.

So after lunch, back to the room for a rest, and then we had our very nice, complementary massages.