Into the Southern Hemisphere!

So we’ve now left Jamaica and the Northern Hemisphere and entered Peru and the Southern Hemisphere. It was quite a long night with our journey broken up into 3 flights. The first stop was into Panama City. Although it was dark and we never got to see the Panama Canal, from the plane we did see the lights of a LOAD of ships out in the water waiting their turn to go through the canal. Quite impressive.

When we finally arrived in Lima (our second stop), Conor naturally rushed off to check the most important thing....does the water in the toilet swirl the other way down here? Well, we can disappointingly conclude from our experiments to date that NO, it doesn’t! It still seems to go counter clockwise – the same as we observed from up north. Perhaps it is more to do with the toilet design than the coriolis effect from the spinning of the Earth. We’ll keep observing...

On a side note, there were plenty of people in the airport wearing face masks, presumably as some protection against the swine flu. We thought it was quite funny to cough sickly whenever these people passed by :)

Our final flight brought us to Cusco, and our initial impressions were...wow, this is a bit chilly! Having spent the last few weeks in the tropical sunshine of Jamaica, Cuba and Mexico, it was a while since we needed long sleeves or socks! But Cusco is actually 11,oooft / 3,500m up in the mountains (one of the highest cities on the planet). This means that the nights and mornings can be fairly cold, but during the day when the sun is up, it is actually quite hot. We also noticed fairly quickly the effects of the thinner air up here. You can feel quite breathless and a bit dizzy at times from only mildly strenuous tasks. Apparently takes a day or two to adjust.

Our reasons for coming to Cusco, are to visit the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu and also to visit the Amazon rainforest. So tomorrow, we’ll set off for a 4 day excursion into the Amazon jungle (this inevitably means we’ll be out of contact until next Monday/Tuesday). We’ll update you on how we get on when we come back. We also plan to meet our friend from Ireland, Fenton, here next week, so looking forward to that.

Oh yeah....and for those who may not know, they actually eat guinea pigs here in Peru, and we got a glimpse of our first specimen on a roadside stall near our hostel....