Lomas de Lachay

So it's 11 p.m. at night and I am just getting home from a long day that started at 5:45 a.m. this morning when I woke up.  I'm completely exhausted right now, but the day was great.  I met up with Mark and Sheila at 7 a.m. at Parque Kennedy where we then walked to the nearest Metro (grocery store) and bought some snacks for the day.  I bought some oranges and cereal bars, which would be my snacks/lunch throughout the day until I ate dinner tonight (healthy, right?).  We then micro-ed to a bus station and got on an 8:40 bus to Lomas de Lachay which is a national reserve outside of the town of Chancay.  And actually we didn't really take a bus there, but rather the bus dropped us off on the Pan-American highway and we proceeded to walk 3-4 km (it's in debate how far we actually walked) to the reserve entrance...

This is what we saw as we were walking to the reserve..promising, huh?

 But, then we started to see some flowers and it made it better.

And then it turned into this!

And this...

 Then we finally made it into the reserve and it was gorgeous!  There was sooo much green everywhere!!  It's weird apparently this place is green and beautful in the winter (summer in the U.S.), but it's all dead and gross in the summer (winter in the U.S).  It's kind of opposite, because usually plants die in the winter.  Anyway, it was gorgeous and with all the green valleys I wanted to see cows or something of that sort...buffalo, deer, gazelles, antelope, horses, wildebeest...something :)  Apparently there are foxes there, but Mark, Sheila, and I didn't see any. :(  Also, I should say that all the green wasn't grass, it was like this vine-y plant ALL over and it was misty for the majority of the time that we were there, but as we were getting ready to leave, there were blue skies and the sun!!


Green!!  Also, I don't know if you can see,
but in the background there is the contrasting desert.

 We walked around for awhile and actually (not purposefully) we ended up on the trail that went ALL the way around the mountain again.  I don't know if you remember or not, but Mark and I went all the way around the mountain at Wayna Picchu.   Anyway, we actually didn't end up going around the mountain, we started up that way, but then saw a huge line of high school or middle school students coming down and we really did NOT want to pass them all because we had already gotten way too much attention from them earlier in the morning.  So we ended up wandering off the trail a little to get to another trail to avoid the screaming school kids.  This was actually a very good thing, because we came across a map and had we decided to go around the mountain we would have been there longer than we wanted to.  Anyway, like I said the sky was clear when we went to leave...

Blue and beautiful skies!!!

Green and gorgeous!

 We then left the park and started walking the 3 or 4 kilometers back to the Pan-American highway.  Once we got there, we didn't really have a plan except for hitch-hiking our bus back to Chancay and then eventually back to Lima.  Well, once we got to the Pan-American highway, we were greeted by some police officers that were sitting with a broken down micro full of kids.


Walking back to the Pan-American highway.  What a difference in scenery!

 Anyway, these police officers, obviously could tell we were white American tourists and said that although Peruvians hitch rides all the time that it wouldn't be safe for us to do it.  Although it would have been easy to hitch our bus, they informed us that anybody could be armed and force us into their vehicle.  Well, we obviously had no other options except to maybe call a cab or to ask the police officers for a ride.  So obviously we asked the police officers for a ride!!  It was still kind of sketchy though because supposedly people really don't trust the police here in Peru either, but we really didn't have a choice.  Anyway, it ended up being fine and it turned into quite a comical event.  We got to see the two police officers pushing a micro down the highway and then we were joined by two other officers who insisted that we take a picture with them, so of course that's what we did...

Needless to say, it was an interesting adventure!!  This probably is going to be one of those "Remember when..." stories.  Anyway, we got to Chancay (safely) and we were hoping to go to a castle that is there, but we were running out of daylight and we wanted to make sure we were back on a bus to Lima in the day.  I kind of want to go back at sometime though to see the difference in the reserve in the summer and also to see the castle.  Obviously, we didn't see the reserve in the summer today, but here's a picture off the internet so you can see the major difference in the lack of (non-existent) vegetation...

So not as pretty!!

Anyway, once we got back to Lima safe and sound, we finally sat down for a halfway decent meal at a pizzeria on La Calle de Pizzas (Pizza Street) in Miraflores.  Pizza Street literally consists of a ton of pizzerias.  As you walk down the street you get bombared by the hosts trying to get you to come to THEIR pizzeria rather than another one.  Mark and I were literally standing there talking to each other (trying to figure out where to go) and we had three hosts around us telling us to go to theirs (we were obviously ignoring them).  We decided that there is really no way to choose correctly where to go, so we walked a little bit further and went to a place that didn't have a host who bombared us!  And it was pretty good pizza and a great deal!!  I am now extremely excited to go to bed!  I'm tired and my legs hurt even more than they did before, but that's okay.  It was another great workout today.  I hope you all are sleeping well right now and if you aren't sleeping right now then you should go to bed like I'm about to.  :)