It’s always dank and the sun never shines through the thick air. How do you describe that atmosphere? It’s to thin to be fog, to thick to be haze. It’s not quite smokey enough to be smog, but its definitely not dreamy enough to be mist. Just plain dankness. Plus, it smells like six-day-old fish.
But what really got me down was getting sick. Bad seafood. It was my fault really, I sort of knew that something wasn’t right when I was eating it. But then all of Lima smells like bad seafood.
And the clincher, what really made Lima worse for me than Bakersfield, was that when I did get sick from said bad seafood, and I was lying in bed in my hostel, and blacking out when I tried to stand up, and unable to journey more than ten minutes from a toilet, I slowly came to realize that I could no longer distinguish between the stench I was generating with every seafood-fueled sprint to the toilet and the smell that lingers over the whole of the city.

ps

Catherine, I found this site when I googled “nevada state mining championships”. I was about to be deeply disappointed with you when I saw Tonopah come up on the “101 places not to visit” website. But then I read what you wrote, and I think it’s okay.