Lima

By far and away the most interesting site we saw in Lima was the monastery.  I never knew that they could be so interesting!  Much to our dismay no photos were allowed anywhere within the monastery... this physically hurt when we were in the library.  But let me start at the beginning.  You are given a 'free' tour of the monastery (probably to make sure you stay where you are supposed to and don't take any photos), on our tour were us and a New Zealand guy who had been travelling around South America for 7 months.   The library houses around 24000 books, dating back to the 1100s and it is like every ancient library you have imagined.  In fact we suspect it has been used in a few movies.  The ancient texts, the spiral staircases leading up to the higher shelves, shafts of light coming in through the skylights with dust spiralling and the whole library built out of carved cedar polished till it shone. Ah.... beautiful.  From there we headed through the  elaborately carved chorister section, past paintings, through courtyards until eventually we reached the catacombs, where bones are piled in 4 meter deep pits.  What seemed very odd to us was that the bones were in coffins until the 1950s when they were taken out, according to our guide, to make it into a tourist attraction.  Weird.