escape from Lima

[devi]

Hasty post: I´m about to get on a little local plane to Pucallpa, on the far side of the Andes in the beginnings of the rainforest. I´ll be staying in a jungle lodge on an oxbow lake of an Amazon tributary, on stilts over the water. From there it´s a riverboat to Iquitos, which you can´t get to by road, which is awesome. I thought I´d be all YAY YAY YAY SMELL YOU LATER LIMA but actually it´s grown on me a lot in the last day or so. I found my travel legs, I got out of the horrible Manhattan Inn and into the glorious faded-colonial-glamour Gran Hotel Bolivar in the centre of town, which only cost a couple of dollars more. I went to the brutal concrete pile of Museo de la Nacion, which was stuffed with fascinating folk art and the kind of place you can only find in a city. They still haven´t found my bag, but they say they´ll send it on to the next place I´m staying because it´s the airline´s fault, and at this stage I don´t care. I´ve bought a little backpack and a few essential bits and I am out of here.

(Clothes shopping in a supermarket in Lima was a weird experience. Everything was either polyester with shoulder pads, ruffled up-to-the-chin librarian prim, or tiny and made of spandex. So I am wearing a man´s T-shirt which I cut down with a scissors. Get this: on top of a design of tribal suns and bird shapes, it says "Forgive me for my mistakes, I´m still a kid learning the responsibility of being adult." I think this is hilarious.)

Anyway, must fly.