Friday, March 7, 2008

Peru -- Day 2

Ahhhh, what a day. I awoke to the fresh, crisp smell of petrol in the air as the morning rush hour had begun. Did you know the average Peruvian honks their horn in one day more than most Canadians do in a year? Ok, I don't have any real stats to back that up, but it's somewhere between an educated guess and fact.

Today, I decided it would be a good day to take it easy after a hectic day of photography yesterday. So today, I had more fresh fruit drinks, more fresh fish (notice a pattern yet?) and had my first, real pisco sour (it's a drink for those of you who don't know).

I'm staying right across from a golf course, and for the past two days, I've used the outside of the golf course as a running track of sorts, so I could continue my running (30 minutes yesterday, 45 minutes today). While I'm right across from a golf course, I have a view of the ocean...and the mountains...and a building depending on what window I'm looking from. I've included a couple of pics here to illustrate. The pics look a little distorted as I combined about 12 pics for the "building" pic and 6 pics for the "ocean" pic. Unfortunately, you can't really see the ocean in the ocean pic since I didn't spend the time to properly shoot the pic or process it. So just pretend it's there and ooo and ahhh a bit.

Prices for any sort of service or labour here is quite cheap. I had a fantastic meal of an appetizer, fresh fish, a pisco sour, a large fruit drink and dessert for about $20 U.S. (about $15 for Canadian folks, bahahahahaha).

I must emphasize once again that the driving here is nuts. You don't drive in a lane. You drive wherever there's room -- on either side of the yellow line. I'm going to try and take a couple of pictures tomorrow to illustrate the chaos they call driving here. I'm not sure why they bother with traffic signals, lines on the road, or stop signs. Apparently, they all went out of style sometime last decade. Yet, I noticed there were no accidents and very, very few cars on the road seemed to have any visible damage from collisions. It's chaos, but at least it appears to be safe chaos, if there is such a thing.

Tomorrow, I'm going to be returning to a restaurant I visited on Thursday. It's right on the ocean on top of a cliff that looks rather unstable and unsafe. I'm hoping to get a few rather cliche sunset pics, but hey, I've got to do it. It's the law for any tourist to take at least one -- otherwise they don't let you back in the country.

Customs agent: "Do you have anything to declare?"
Me: "Yes, $200 in clothing and $150 in souvenirs."
Customs agent: "Any liquor, cigarettes, live animals, dead people, or plants?"
Me: "Nope."
Customs agent: "Can I see your sunset picture please?"
Me: "Well, you see, I actually was...well, it was raining most of the time and...well, I mean the camera battery was charging and ---- "
Customs agent: "I'm sorry, I'm afraid that'll be a $2,000 fine. You've let your family and friends down. Here, we'll give you this generic sunset picture you can use for your obligatory vacation slideshow. You ARE planning on a vacation slideshow, aren't you?"












1 comment:

Confuzzed said...

hehe, those are awsome pics, i think i mgiht have to google how to take multiple pics and place them together :)