Hola from Lima!

We have arrived Peru!! After a few hours sleep on the floor of Heathrow Terminal 5 we were up at 04:30 to have our bike bags 'clingfilmed' before check-in. Slept surprisingly well except for the 30min of PA siren testing at 2:30am.

Felt like we were getting a very good deal on the bike box wrapping by paying the same amount as people with much smaller suitcases!  Fortunately we decided to weigh the bikes accurately before having them wrapped (Tobys home scale had a rather large margin of uncertainty) and we had to do some last minute carry-on stuffing to bring Sunny and my bike boxes down from 36kg to the maximum 32kg! (Toby adds that his box was just the right weight - not enough group kit in there?! ;-) Due to the repack we walked through to departures with our carry-on bags decorated like Christmas trees with all sorts of bits and kit hanging off (glad we weren't flying easyJet!). 

Had an uneventful flight to Madrid and when boarding the Lima flight recieved some attention from curious co-passengers who spotted our bike helmets - I think they were impressed!

The 12hr flight to Lima was fine, and the lack of a TV screen wasn't quite made up for with some orchestral take off and landing music. Had a few games of cards, read, played on phones, practiced spanish, slept, ordered orange juice in spanish, ate meatballs...repeat...

On arrival into Lima we went straight through customs and were very pleased that our bike boxes look to be in good shape - we will fully unpack them once we have flown to Cuzco. Had do to some taxi 'negotiation' after our airport pick-up vehicle turned out to be a wee bit small! However ended up with a friendly van driver at a reasonable price which even included some Spanish lessons enroute.

We are now chilling at the comfortable 'Lighthouse' hostel in Lima where we will be spending two nights before flying to Cuzco early Saturday morning.

Feel excited to be in Peru at last - it's all becoming real! More soon...

Andrew