Here Comes The Rain Again*

Summer in Peru is akin to summer in England – it rains a lot. It started on Saturday night at about 8pm and stopped on Sunday at about 1.30pm. We spent the morning trudging through very wet streets, wearing our very fetching Peruvian waterproof ponchos (SO fashionable dahling), we visited a very poor museum about the history of Peru (can’t have much history – there were only three rooms), we tried to visit a couple of churches but this being Sunday they were closed... so we went to a coffee shop that can only be described as a cross between a workman’s caff and a French patisserie but the coffee was very good (can’t have been Peruvian or French!) Went for lunch at a very nice restaurant serving Peruvian/Japanese fusion food – At this point we should say that this is all true and we haven’t been knocking back too much coco leaf tea.
In the afternoon we visited the church of Santo Domingo which contains some of the worst of Spanish Catholic ‘art’ imaginable – one tableau has Jesus covered in blood from head to foot but wearing a jewel encrusted green velvet loincloth watched over by his mother dressed in pink chiffon edged with gold and wearing a slightly different pink (no fashion sense that woman) velvet cloak that is dripping with gold and jewels – loverly! Sadly, photography was not allowed so you are unable to share in this hideous sight. The real reason for going though was to visit the cloisters which, along with the church, were built on the Inca Empire’s richest temple – the Qoricancha or Temple of the Sun. During Inca times this temple was literally covered with gold, but within months of the arrival of the first conquistadors this incredible wealth had all been melted down. Gutting of the baroque cloisters and excavation has revealed five chambers that were part of the temple which shows some of the finest Inca stonework inside the city.





We did a bit more mooching but by 5pm torrential rain, this time accompanied by thunder and lightning, had returned so spent the afternoon uploading photographs, blogging and generally getting ready for our departure tomorrow to the Sacred Valley of the Incas and on to Machu Pichu........

*Here Comes the Rain Again – title of song by pop duo Eurythmics, written by Annie Lennox and David A. Stewart and produced by Stewart. The song was released as the third single in the UK from the album ‘Touch’