South American Adventure, Day 1:

Tim waves goodbye to Guyana at the Cheddi Jagan airport

Maracas Beach for a few hours during our layover. Best layover ever!

It’s been a whirl-wind day. We left our friend’s G/T house at 4am and arrived at the Cheddi Jagan airport with plenty of time for our 6:20 departure with no real drama. We met the other Peace Corps girls there who we are traveling with at first and said some good-bye’s for now to other volunteers who were flying directly home to the U.S. today. To make matters even more perfect, the plane was already being boarded as we walked through security, so we walked straight on to the flight and into the air.

We flew to Trinidad and, since we had an 8 hour lay-over, were blessed with the opportunity to “take a walk” around the island. We decided that instead of waiting in the boring airport, we should explore Trinidad so we hired a car to give us a tour. We went through Port of Spain, and got out of the taxi to walk around the capital city. We saw some old colonial churches and neat architecture and ate some really good local street food called “doubles”. A double is similar to fried roti, but this isn’t your auntie’s plain old roti! We watched the vendors lather on pepper sauce and two other sauces that looked a lot like salsa, but tasted like cilantro and chutney and the final touch is a heap of boiled chickpeas (anyone who reads our food blog knows how much Tim loves chickpeas!). We were stoked to try this tasty local treat. Then our driver took us to the best beach in Trinidad, according to him, called Maracas. It was a truly beautiful beach, tucked deep into a cove, surrounded by lush, jungle covered mountains. The water was chilly but the air was warm and we enjoyed a few luxurious moments drinking in the last of the Caribbean heat and a final Stag beer on the beach.

The flight to Panama passed in fits of wakefulness, but we didn’t have much time to dwell on our own exhaustion because we boarded to Peru within thirty minutes of touching down. The flight to Lima was good, there was tons of space to spread out so Chels and I decided to claim a row for ourselves and catch a bit of shuteye. We found our hostel and had the whole dorm to ourselves too so we didn’t have to worry about waking anyone when we came in. The beds are clean and warm and the room is mosquito and mosquito net free. We are happy RPCVs! And now its sleep time.

T & C (0230 local time)

p.s. I am posting this on Thursday morning, since we were too tired to finish the blog last night. Happy Thursday! We are off to explore Lima!

View from a vista point in Trinidad. I'm pretty sure we saw a pirate ship here.

Eating doubles on the streets in Port of Spain. Best fifty cents spent on lunch ever!

Found a labyrinth in Trinidad at a cool old church.

The sock monkeys had a blast on the layover too!