Our last long-distance bus journey of the trip: a 15-hour overnight bus journey took us from Piura to Lima. Over the months we'd had some negative reports about Lima from fellow travellers but we quite enjoyed the couple of days we spent here.

Our hostel was in Miraflores, the modern, upmarket area full of shops, restaurants, casinos and the like, just because that was where we could find a good hostel at a good price. Lots of the shops are advertising Father's Day with lovely slogans to encourage the kids to part with their hard-earned cash.

It's a big city and the old town was several kilometres away, so we took a local bus in order to explore the more interesting historic parts of the city. We think Rosa may have branched out into bus services, as all the seats were emblazoned with her name, but we're not sure where she found Micky the bus driver.

As you may have gathered, we are on wind-down for going home now and feel we've kind of seen enough churches, gold museums and archaeological sites for the time being. However, Jen had done her detective work to find something obscure. Hence we headed for the plaza where we could see the statue of Madre Patria.

Apparently the sculpture was commissioned in Spain but when they sent the message to Peru they hadn't realised that the request to put 'llama' (flame) on her head may be misinterpreted. Although in Spanish 'llama' means flame (or call), in South America it is more usually used to mean our furry little friend who lives in the Andes and provides wool and meat, See the photographic evidence for the outcome of the sculptor's interpretation.

In the old town we also encountered huge numbers of people gathered near the presidential palace, with lots of blacked-out cars and security everywhere. We guessed from the Ecuadorian flags accompanying the Peruvian flags that that someone from Ecuador may be visiting. However, we got bored of waiting and decided that, as we wouldn't recognise any of them anyway, the cafe down the road seemed like a better place to be.

The Convent of San Francisco promised to reveal bones in the crypt, and indeed there were. We had to go with a guide and weren't allowed to take photo's but there were one or two within our group who always loitered at the end of the group until the guide was out of sight....

Our other potentially significant Lima outing was a good walk from our hostel to the remains of an adobe pyramid now surrounded by suburbia. Unfortunately when we got the there, although the gate was open and the signs said it was open, a guy inside told us that it was closed for departmental reasons but they'd be open 'mañana'.

They seemed to be setting up for some sort of party and we were getting fed up of places being closed during advertised opening hours. We decided that a walk around the outside viewing it through the railings was enough for us. In reality, the pyramid looked very much restored and in one area there was even an army of workmen madly rebuilding there and then.