Tuesday 13 October:

Itinerary:  Puerto Maldonado to Lima. After breakfast we will transfer to the airport for our flight to Lima, where our hotel is in Miraflores, a beachside suburb. In the evening we will share a farewell dinner. Hotel accommodation in Miraflores, Lima.

We awoke to the sound of the falling rain.  In fact it bucketed down and there was really no sensible chance of even getting out  for a walk around Puerto Maldonado.  A couple of things I noticed:

• due to the pouring rain all the motorcyclists (including those driving the little 3 wheeled cabs), were wearing wellingtons.  This says something about the nature and frequency of the rain, and the relative affluence of the folk being able to afford special footwear for the rain - in Tanzania they'd just take their shoes off to preserve them!
• A primary school was opposite the hotel.  This led an entrepreneur to set up a stall selling candy and lurid toys for the kids.  Talk about hostage marketing!

Out to the airport and through formalities in reasonable order.  The plane - an Airbus 319 - took off on time, although a few weird looking waders (ie shorebirds, not long wellingtons) were flushed during taxi.   Neither Ian, Frances nor I got a good enough look at them identify them.  Drat.

Cusco happened briefly and then we flew down to Lima.  Despite close peering as we approached the coast there was no evidence of the Nasca lines.  As we got even closer to Lima the only thing visible was the usual fog generated from the offshore Humboldt Current.

After landing it was suggested we might care to check-in that day to save aggravation the following morning.  This seemed pretty good advice, although I noticed that the first members of the group seemed to take quite a time. As did people who weren't members of our group.  In contrast we went quite quickly until - just after we moved from the counter - I checked the boarding passes we'd been given.  All was OK down to Santiago but from there to Auckland and Sydney Frances and I were seated 3 rows apart!!  I was smartly back to the charming young lady (CYL) to ask her to fix this and she said she couldn't as "My system can't access that: it is in Santiago".  Upon her manager being called he made about three keystrokes and gave me back new boarding passes for adjoining seats.  If the CYL is not a close personal friend of the CEO of LAN I expect/hope she is now in a more suitable position- probably one involving collecting 1 sole from people and handing out tissue paper.

The bus driver obligingly took us towards the coast.  Just as Juan

• commented about the crazy drivers of Lima we had to avoid a prang; and 
• followed up about the tough new traffic laws, our driver scored a ticket for driving in the wrong lane!

It emerged that not all Peruvian pigeon are Pale-vented.  In Lima most of them are West Peruvian Doves.  As we went along the coast we carefully checked all the cormorants perched on light poles but there was nothing unusual there.  The first Peruvian Pelican was seen gliding offshore.

The Hotel was excellent, although we didn't stay there for long before heading out shopping.   We started out walking down to the cliff-top promenade I remembered from my previous visit and thence along to a shopping centre/entertainment area looking for a bookshop to acquire a book on orchids.  We failed on that and the craft shop I remembered seemed to have downsized - they had very few carpets, no that we had the luggage capacity to handle one!

So we just headed off down the main street towards the Indian Markets, in the hope that there would be some carved bugs there.  We came across various book stores on the way, but none of them had anything worthwhile on orchids, so we passed.  Frances was able to acquire some handkerchiefs.  We arrived at a large church alongside a major park and wandered in for a snuffle.  As usual very well decorated.

The Indian Markets were an interesting bunch of shops.  In fact they were a bunch of arcades, each of which contained several shops.  There were a few punters around (and the stall holders were not pushy- at least not by Mwenge wood carvers standards).  However it was a pity that many of the shops had the same stuff, and in such quantities that one felt it was being produced by machines in the back blocks of China rather than hand-crafted in Amazonia.  They didn't have anything with the charm of the bugs from Manu, nor anything else we needed.  So they didn't get our money.

Evening meal was at a restaurant on the Pier at the foot of the cliffs.  To say this was a brilliant finish to the trip would be an understatement.  Food was excellent, wines good and service very good.  Tired but content we went back to the Hotel.