Our first incident

We've been travelling for 1 month and 2 days, and we've heard a ton of bad stories from a bunch of different people, but so far we have been pretty lucky. Until yesterday. Yesterday we had our first "incident", but we've come out the other side basically unscathed. Just one more notch in the belt of travelling stories.

We arrived in Lima on Nov 1 after travelling for 26 hours on a bus from Ecuador. We are becoming experts at understanding Spanish-dubbed movies. We checked into a hostel in Miraflores, which is the "posh" (and supposedly safter) section of Lima to meet our friends Jon and Hannah. Miraflores looks just like Vancouver- 4 blocks down the street from our hostel is an area that looks just like Metropolis. There is everything you could ever want, plus a lot of stuff you would never want. It's a nice change from where we've been, although we don't desire to stay too long.

Anyway, yesterday we 4 decided to head to Pachacamac, which are some Inca ruins about 20km south of Miraflores. The hostel owner gave us directions on how to take the bus, so we grabbed our cameras and set out. We had to make a bus transfer at a bridge (outside of Miraflores) to get back on the PanAmerica highway. We walked up the stairs to the bridge, and were standing in the melee waiting for the proper bus to come along. All of a sudden I saw a guy grab my bag and start pulling. My bag is just a small "purse" that I wear across my body and all it had in it was a guide book, some pens, hand cleaner, and one wallet (which had about $50 in it, which is actually more than I normally carry). Anyway, the guy was jerking the bag down, I guess trying to break the straps. I started screaming bloody murder (I'm not sure how "fuck off" translates to Spanish, but I think he got the idea) and I tried to pull away. He kept jerking the bag over and over again, and was dragging me out into the street (the frickin' highway, keep in mind). There were two other guys there, who I thought were helping me, but I found out later they were helping HIM. I finally got my wits about me and took a swing at his head, but at that moment he gave up and ran away. I turned to see both Jon and Cam running over to help- the whole incident probably took 20secs. I hadn't realized it, but one of the guys had also tried to grab the camera from Cam. Cam was wearing the camera across his body as well and grabbed it closer to his body like a football and spun, but he fell to the ground. The guy then left Cam and came over to me- which was fortunate for us since our camera was worth much more than my bag. Anyway, we ended up coming away unscathed, except for some rope burn on my arm where my strap was rubbing, and a bit of emotional damage. We got back on the horse right away and carried on to Pachacamac. The worst part was we had to return to the same bridge on the way home, but I just held my bag even tighter and we were fine!

Hopefully that will be our one and only incident, but it doesn't give me too good of a feeling about Peru! We lasted in Ecuador for 31 days without a problem.

Anyway, today we are going to head down to Central Lima to see the sights. We'll take our camera, but I'll leave my bag at home! Tomorrow we are heading south to Ica where we can do some sandboarding. Coastal Peru has so much sand- it is essentially a desert. It makes for some beautiful landscapes, with the ocean on one side, and miles of dunes on the other. People build there homes right into the sand cliffs, which seems crazy given the seismic activity around here, but they don't have a lot of other choice, I guess.

All is well. We are one day older and wiser, but still happy and safe.

Hi to all-
Kristin and Cam.