Day 1: The Flight

This morning Joy, Lilly, and I awoke at 4:00 am and headed for the Sacramento airport. We had a smooth flight to Dallas, Texas, where we met Fritz and Rabieb who had flown in from Los Angeles. After a short layover we boarded a 757 for a 6 hour, 47 minute flight to Lima, the capital of Peru. We landed close to midnight and walked down the de-boarding stairs to the small, crowded airport. Rabieb was tired and having trouble walking so we asked for a wheelchair, which turned out to be very fortunate since it allowed us to jump right to the front of the long customs line. Once we had finally collected all of our baggage we exited the airport into a huge crowd of people outside. So many people were holding signs waiting for arrivals that it took us a while to find our guide. Finally we all piled into a van, headed into Lima, and our first experience with the Peruvian roads. There are very few traffic rules and everybody cuts right in front of one another, drives inches apart, cruises right down the middle of the lanes and uses their horn as often as their gas pedal. It was crazier than any city I’ve ever been in, but amazingly there seemed to be very few accidents. Lima also doesn’t have any emission controls so most of the cars were just spouting out pollution creating smog and making it hard to breath. Our guide, Fabriosa, spoke English quite well and told us some of the facts about Lima, Peru, and our trip. Lima has a population of 8 million and is split into many districts. We stayed in one of the nicest area, on the outskirts of Lima, called Miraflores. Our hotel, La Hotel Castellana, was an older Spanish style but very comfortable.

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