From Lima with love

We arrived on Monday night and spent a day in Lima. Ah, stinky Lima. City of noise. City of tooting car horns, smog and pan pipe renditions of Paul Simon's greatest hits. Eight million people live there, most of whom seem to make a living by selling cakes and bottles of Inca-Kola on street corners.

We spent the day waiting for the airport to find Jenny's bag and then wandering around in a jet-lagged daze, trying not to be run over. Lima's choked with pollution. The buildings are so many squat cubes of nude breeze block. Higgledy-piggledy shanty housing pokes up between other tatty piles of crumbling concrete. But the people were pretty friendly. Cops stopped to chat. Men waved and wandered over to natter. Then hurried off again when they realised our Spanish was so bad they might as well have been talking to two brick walls.

Wednesday we left Lima for Quito, Ecuador. On the way our plane was struck by lightning, which shook off the last of the jet lag. We landed in a thunder storm with sheets of rain battering the little plane. It looked like it had been coming down for days. But within a few minutes the rain had stopped and the sun blazed in the sky and it was T-shirt weather.

Quito´s a beautiful place - tucked into a little basin in the Andes, 3,500 metres above sea level, with grassy mountains rising up thousands of feet on all sides. It's calmer than Lima, and cleaner.

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We're holed up in a cheapo hostel in the new town – eight bucks a night for a damp double room. With the heat outside and the moisture in there, it´s like a little womb all of our own. A womb with a view of a tatty courtyard and a washing line, and a couple of other soiled travellers.

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The old town is two miles south and it´s quite spectacular – mile upon mile of colonial architecture, battered, worm-eaten wooden buildings painted pink and pale blue. The streets are narrow and thick with people, most of them indigenous Indians, many of the women carrying babies in blankets on their backs, their necks wound tight with strings of gold beads. The guide books say it's dodgy there, that bags are slashed and pockets picked on the old town´s cluttered pavements, but we´ve found the whole place to be completely friendly and welcoming.

Our fair (now pinking) skin draws some stares but nothing hostile. Two little kids did have an argument yesterday about whether Jenny was a man or a woman – imagine a six year old Indian boy screaming ´tiene tittas´ and miming boobs while his sister stamped her feet screaming ´Hombre! Hombre!´at the top of her voice – but all in all the people are warm and patient.   

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That´s not to say that there isn´t a pretty high gun quota on the streets. Heavily armed cops and soldiers everywhere. They direct traffic by waving their pump-action shot guns vaguely in one direction or another. Rather charmingly, the women soldiers wear pink camo.

This is a surreptitious shot I took it on the tram, just to prove it.

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Tomorrow we head to the Amazon, a few thousand metres nearer sea level, to spend the next couple of weeks living with a community of indigenous Indians. We´ve been told there are no showers, no toilets and we´ll be eating yams three times a day. Joy. It probably means there won´t be another post for a while, but check back in a week or two or leave a comment in the meantime.