Picking up from Some People Collect Stamps. We Collect Roads.The series starts here: Peru and Bolivia: A Road Trip Through the Andes, the Altiplano and the World’s Most Dangerous Road.

We flew into Lima with high hopes.

Lima arrived the way big cities do — loud, dusty, and entirely indifferent to jet lag. The coast doesn’t help: a grey Pacific, flat surf running into a pier below the clifftops, the city sitting under a permanent layer of sea fog that doesn’t lift until mid-afternoon. Locals call it the garúa — a fog so reliable it has its own name, and its own opinion on whether you’ll see the sun before lunch. It suited our mood after long flights.

Our guide moved at pace the following morning. First stop was Miraflores, the clifftop district where Lima does its best impression of a city that isn’t worried about anything. The malecón runs for miles along the top of the cliffs, and at its centre sits Love Park — a fence thick with padlocks, and above it a vast sculpture of two lovers mid-embrace, tiled in the same broken-mosaic style as Gaudí’s Park Güell, which is precisely where the designer stole the idea from. The artist modelled it on himself and his wife. It required no interpretation. We took the photo and moved on.

The plaza in the old town came with riot police — a full line of them, shields up, helmets on, watching a pigeon cross the flagstones. Just in case. Francisco Pizarro, first Spanish colonist and conqueror of an empire with a few hundred men, has since been relocated to a quieter park down the road, well away from the cathedral that once celebrated him. He sits on his horse in full armour, looking out over the garden beds.

The demotion suits him.

Astrid y Gastón

Every new country deserves a proper welcome. Ours comes in the form of a special dinner — somewhere local, somewhere worth dressing up for. It’s become a ritual, a way of arriving not just physically but fully.

This one was Janine’s birthday, and the tasting menu at Astrid y Gastón seemed like appropriate recognition of the occasion. The restaurant is set inside Casa Moreyra, a colonial-era hacienda in San Isidro old enough to have its own history before anyone thought to put a kitchen in it.  It’s the kind of setting that does the work before the food arrives. It’s the flagship of Gastón Acurio, the chef most often credited with putting Peruvian food on the world stage, and the reputation, on the night, held up.

Fourteen courses. One of them was guinea pig, presented with rather more ceremony than the animal’s reputation would suggest. Another was hare with chocolate sauce, which Janine logged as her least favourite — a rare miss in an otherwise unbroken run of good decisions from the kitchen. The lúcuma dessert was the highlight, a native Peruvian fruit somewhere between caramel and sweet potato that has no real equivalent back home. By the time it arrived we were only managing four of the sweet courses before admitting defeat. Fourteen courses is a commitment, not a suggestion.

The serviette was beautiful — heavy linen, properly pressed, the kind of thing you don’t get twice a decade.

I wouldn’t let Janine take it.