I finally made it to the Pukara Hostal in Lima, Perú last night around 2am, completely exhausted (and probably quite smelly from wearing the same clothes for more than 24 hours). The hostal is fairly basic (shared bathroom, and this morning I drank the first cup of instant coffee I’ve had in years!), but I have a private room with cable TV and a reasonably comfortable bed, so it’ll be fine for two nights.

I’m gradually dredging up my Spanish vocabulary again, and trying to forget the dozen or so words on Portuguese I picked up in Brazil. It’s definitely good to be able to understand things somewhat again, although I’ll miss the lyrical sound of Portuguese — it was nice to listen to, even without being able to understand very much!

Today is mostly going to be a logistics day — I’ve already dropped some laundry off at a Lavanderia, been to a supermarket, checked my e-mail and arranged to meet up later for a drink with Eduardo (a guy Nan & I met at the hostel in Buenos Aires), and now I need to figure out how I’m going to spend the last two weeks of my trip. Of course I have to go to Cuzco for the whole Macchu Pichu thing, but I’m also thinking of going up to Iquitos to see the Amazon jungle for a while too.

I’m already starting to feel like I’m running out of time on this trip, and I still have two weeks left! I also need to confirm with the LACSA airline that I can avoid going back to Chile for the return flight home — my four segment flight back to the U.S. stops in Lima anyway, so hopefully I can just pick it up there. Not that there’s anything wrong with Chile, of course, it’s just seems pointless to fly down to Santiago just to come back up to Lima again.