Cheeky Moche pot

See our 'Moche' photos.

After three months spent in the Andes, we finally flew down to sea level again on Wednesday. Landing in Lima, we immediately caught a bus North to Chiclayo. There are a lot less tourists up north and Peruvians have been staring at us since we arrived.

They stare at us in the street and they stare at us in restaurants. A guy even staged an 11-hour stare-a-thon on our bus journey from Lima, without blinking. Girls and kids find it a novelty and sometimes shout "hello!" at us in the street. Some guys just stare at us as if they're trying to work out how much money is in our pockets.

We've enjoyed a few frantic days of sightseeing, visiting various pre-Inca sites of the Moche and Chimu period (which was roughly from the birth of Christ to 1470). We had to shell out a small fortune for a private tour of the sites, due to the lack of tourists in Chiclayo (the 30 or so people who had booked into our hotel prior to us were Peruvian).

Our guide stumbled through a musuem tour, with little knowledge of what he was talking about and even less knowldege of the English language. At the end of the tour, we sat in a room with a load of kids who were on a school daytrip. After a short wait, a member of museum staff clambered out of a cupboard in his full Moche King gear. 10 minutes of stomping about and chanting culminated in him asking our guide, in Spanish: "Do they speak espanol?"

"A little, I think," our guide replied.

"Well get them to have their photo taken with me so they can give me some money," the Moche King said, setting a fine example to the kids on how to deal with tourists: fleece them for all the cash they have.

We flatly refused to have our photo taken in front of 30 school children, especially when our guide tried to persuade us to wear silly, fake gold headsets. I gave the King one Peruvian Sol anyway - fake gold armour can't come cheap after all.

We arrived in Trujillo yesterday, which is where we'd originally planned to volunteer, before we learnt that the organisation we were going to work for was corrupt. We're glad that we volunteered in Sucre instead. The Peruvian coast appears to be shrouded in a constant fog and the towns have a depressing feeling about them. We also volunteered last week for a few days while in Ollantaytambo, working in a restaurant that served free food to 130 kids each day. It involved lots of chopping veg.

Peruvian food update: I tried ceviche (raw fish) and didn't die. I can't say that I liked the texture, but I'm more likely to eat it again before going back for more roast guinea pig.

We head to Lima in a couple of days, then continue to work our way south to Nazca and Arequipa, before reaching Argentina. I hope everyone back home in London is ok after the blitz. Thanks for contacting us, to those who did.