Well, I've stayed longer in Trujillo than I planned, but I just could not find the time to fly yesterday. As small as the airport was, the town seemed to be quite large. I have only seen it at night, but still, I got pretty good idea about its size (see below). I was having all these ideas about flying around Andes in Peru, and checking out this or that, but at the end, I have decided against it. After studying the topo map of that area, I found out that it would be near impossible for me to actually do that in Cessna 182, without coming in close encounter of the third kind with the side of a mountain. Peruvian Andes are just too darn high, and my plane does not have turbo or anything similar that would produce more ponies at that altitude. The good news though, is that since I will not be "touristing" around the mountains, I can fly at night, and I will be at Antarctica sooner. I cannot wait! For those of you who were wondering how am I flying at night, I have included below the screen of how that actually looks. I check the area on the map, make sure I know the detailed topography, where the high peaks are, and what is the safe heading and altitude. All that is built into my flight plan which is then loaded into Garmin 500 (and what a cool gadget that is) and shown on top of the nice color map, together with whole lot of other useful information. The only thing you need to do than, is to follow the flight plan, and make sure the speed, heading, altitude, mixture and other things are all set correctly, and that is that. Once you get near the airport you are going to, call the ATC, request permission to land, follow their instructions and voila! You are there. So, I after my takeoff from Trujillo airport, I've set the course to 150, climbed to my desired altitude of 7,500 ft. and then looked at the starts most of the time. There was little else to see, plus I really like staring at stars anyway. As I was approaching Lima, I realized that the airport I picked as my destination was not the big international one, but rather a small military airport. Ops! I called ahead, got clearance to land, and landed OK (no ILS again). Luckily, Peruvian military did not mind an ignorant tourist from the US. I hope they will take good care of my 182 while I spend the night in the capital of Peru having fun. I will still double check the rest of my planned destinations though.

Trujillo flyby Southern Pacific by night Instrument flying Final approach to SPLP (Las Palmas airport)

List of countries: Peru

Flight log: