Again we took a night bus, this time from Arequipa towards the capital, Lima. And that’s where we had the opportunity to do couchsurfing with a super cool Peruvian family, formed by 3 exciting sisters, Andrea, Ada and Paola, and their friendly parents, Sergio and Ada. We made a dinner for them on the first day, on the menu velouté of mushroom, strogonof and brigadeiro. Everyone loved it and we ha a good time with them.

Lima surprised us. The city is much more beautiful, interesting and well preserved than we thought. The Plaza de Armas with its beautiful buildings around and the impressive Government Palace in European style is a must and we got there right at noon and caught the changing of the guard at the style of Buckingham Palace.

We visited the Monastery of San Francisco and we were impressed with the old library room, which seemed to have been taken from a Harry Potter movie. No kidding, it has been about 300 years that anyone touches a book there. And there was also the catacombs with some 25,000 bodies with their bones tidy, similar to the Catacombs of Paris!

Lima was the best place to eat the delicious Ceviche, which we could always find in menus for just 3 U$ and we became completely addicted.

We met again our friend Bastien and we went to see the sunset on the waterfront, which has a beautiful hill facing the sea.

At night we tasted all different flavors of Pico Sour in a cool bar in the neighborhood of Barranco. Pisco Sour is sooooo good!

From Lima we left for Huaraz, in the impressive Cordillera Blanca. We wanted to do 4 days trekking in the Cordillera but at this time of the year the weather is bad, the snowy peaks are always covered with clouds and it always rains in the afternoon. We are done of trekking in the rain, so mission aborted!

But we still visited the lagoon Llanganuco, which has a striking green water and views to the snowy peaks.

On the way we stopped at the Yungai Memorial, where stood the city of Yungai before the terrible tragedy in 1970, when the city was taken off the map after a devastating avalanche caused by an earthquake killing 5000 people in 3 minutes.