I flew into Lima in the early hours of December 14. A desert city on the Peru’s western coast, Lima is known for its depressing weather, and sure enough it greeted us with oppressive clouds and fog. A taxi took Kate and me to a hostel in Lima’s Miraflores district, one of the nicer tourist districts in the city. I didn’t really know what to expect, having never been to South America, but Miraflores was definitely not anything like what I would have anticipated. Within a five-minute walk of our hostel were a TGI Friday’s, a Chili’s, a McDonald’s, a Starbucks, and a Domino’s pizza. We spent the rest of our first day trying to fight jet lag while exploring the area around our hostel. We ate dinner at a nice Italian restaurant a few blocks from the hostel—apparently Italian food is a hot trend in Peru.
My flight landed in Cancun, Mexico a little before nine PM. A shuttle took my family to our hotel in Playa del Carmen, a beach town about 40 minutes south of Cancun. Perhaps slightly less blatantly commercial than Cancun or Cozumel, Playa del Carmen is still highly Americanized, and its main drag, “La Quinta Avenida”, has certainly inherited some of the materialism of its namesake. For the most part, though, we enjoyed our beach resort, the Shangri-La Caribe, and the ocean waters consistently warmer than seventy degrees.
During junior high I was lucky enough to find a program through my school that took a group of students on an ecotour of Costa Rica for twelve days during the summer. I begged my parents to let me go the summer after my sixth grade year. They refused, but agreed to let me go the next year if I raised half of the money myself. During seventh grade, I worked to raise the money and eagerly anticipated my departure to Central America. Early in the summer, I closed out my bank account and paid my parents my share of the costs. I was actually going to go!