Tomorrow The Sun Will Rise

The funniest thing about traveling is the effort you put into planning it. The days or weeks or months of looking at proposed itineraries, reading first hand accounts, soliciting suggestions, packing, shopping, repacking... and in the end it all goes out the window.

4 days have passed since I lost my bag. Luckily for me I was coming to Lima to meet friends, and Alberto (the Italian with whom I will be living in Buenos Aires) leant me a pair of pants, socks, boxers and shirt - to add to the shirt, shorts, boxers and socks I was already wearing. After 2 hours in the airport, I walked half a kilometer to the local highway to avoid paying the outrageous $30-$50 airport cabs charge and caught a city cab to downtown for $5. I arrived at a huge, gated mansion which the owner turned into a hostal a few years back. From the outside, one could never tell that behind that small mahogony door set into white stucko sat a 3 story house of immense beauty. The 3 days I spent in Lima were mostly passed planning the next few weeks - coupled with a few trips to city center and the ever necessary night of cosmic bowling on a cliff overlooking the sea. I spent every day feverously calling the airport in search of my bag, only to have the phone ring and ring.

Hopeless, we left the hostal owner with the airport # & hopped an overnight bus up north to a beach town called Trujillo. We arrived @ 7 am and caught a cab to a town a few kilometers south called Huanchaco, where upon arrival we picked up some boards and went surfing (tho u could hardly call what i did surfing, since the really wide break made it impossible to paddle around the waves, and i got thrashed by wave after wave until i had to admit defeat). At 2 we caught a bus to a tour of the largest adobe city ever built, Chan Chan. The whole city corresponds to an indigenous people who preceeded the Incans and were eventually defeated by them. The main area we toured was a palace of the first governor - a 110,000 square METER palace capable of housing hundreds of individuals. The rest of the day was pretty uneventful... let the fight continue tomorrow.