Is This It?

After quite a good sleep, despite having the most lumpy pathetic pillows we’ve ever seen in our lives (they should’ve been thrown away years ago and we had to use our sleeping bags to get any sort of support), we skipped the delights of breakfast at the hostel and headed instead back down to the shopping area on the cliffs, Larcomar, which we’d visited a couple of weeks ago.

Where we purchased a much better alternative than a hostel breakfast in the form of a Dunkin Donuts cappuccino and donut each!

We had a very slow walk around the shops there, looking for any last minute souvenirs or clothes to cram into our packs, but we were pretty much just going through the motions and killing time until the fast food restaurants opened in the shopping complex.

And so, to kill even more time and in a move at odds with much of the “cultural” stuff we’ve done on this trip, we popped into an amusement arcade for half an hour!

Playing on the bowling, basketball and car racing games, we soon had an armful of tickets we’d won! So, we headed over to the redemption counter in the arcade and left with three tiny ball bearing puzzles in return for thirty vouchers!

The fast food counters having now opened, we stuffed our faces silly with grease, and then headed back to the hostel, having spent less than three hours outside.

Getting back to the hostel, we spent the rest of the afternoon and evening not really being bothered about doing anything other than watching TV.

We’re in a complete daze and it’s so hard to believe that this is it. It’s probably made worse by the fact that we’ve had a relatively easy few days here and in Nazca, and we feel fully recharged and ready to tackle the next journey to the next new place.

Apart from the inescapable fact that there are no more journeys to new places. We wouldn’t have the money to do any more in any case. But its such a strange feeling to be right at the end of the trip and feel so full of energy; we always thought we’d be on our last legs by now and glad for the rest at home but we just want to keep going!

The last thing we did today was to keep a promise we’d made to each other on our last night in Hong Kong. We’d sat there in our hotel room listening to the Damon Albarn/ Gorrilaz track “Hong Kong” and staring at the Hong Kong skyline, and it had been such a poignant moment that we’d made a commitment to play the same track at the end of our very last night abroad. Well that was now, so we sat and listened, reminiscing about some of the wonderful experiences we’d shared in the preceding six months, and mentally trying to come to terms with the end of our journey.

We’ve still got several hours to kill in Lima tomorrow, which we’ll probably spend playing in the arcade again because there’s precious little else to do in the time we have, as well as about fourteen hours in the air before we get back to Heathrow Airport.

But, travelling home aside, for our journey, this is it.