Late Night in Lima

Since our flight arrived into Lima at 1:00 am, we arranged for a taxi through our hotel.  Getting through immigration and customs was fast and painless, especially since there is no visa or entry fee. A message from the hotel explicitly told us to look for a sign that had the hotel name and John’s name on it and not to leave the airport building.  There were lots of signs with names on them but none with John’s on it. As we repeatedly wondered up and down the aisles of signs, we kept getting appeals from taxi drivers to take us anywhere.  Just as we were coming up with Plan B, a man with the sign appeared out of nowhere. He didn’t offer to carry one of our bags.  As we walked out of the airport he mumbled that he was parked outside the airport gate.  John then recalled a TripAdvisor review of our hotel that he had read about how taxi drivers make more money on a fixed fare by not entering the airport and having you walk a good distance of the very short drive to the hotel.  Sure enough, a three-minute drive later we were at the hotel.  This was all fine, but funny that we experienced the exact thing we were warned against by someone on TripAdvisor.

Our flight from Lima to Cusco was easy.  John met a character of a guide on the plane that we may get together with in Cusco. After settling into our homestay, we made an afternoon excursion to the cell phone provider.  We had to buy our 4th phone of the trip.  This time we didn’t lose the phone we’re replacing.  It is broken and we were never very happy with it.  We also had another successful session getting our modem set up.  As in all of the previous countries, it took a combination of the provider’s knowledge of their system and Eydie’s understanding of our Ghanaian modem software.  It wasn’t sold as a universal modem so we’re amazed each time that we’re able to make it work in a new country.