Aug 2009

Managing several five minute power sleeps, we had just fallen properly asleep when at 3am in the morning, the cabin crew woke up the entire plane, turned on all the lights, and served everyone a sandwich! And by sandwich I mean the most insignificant, air filled, nothingness that you could imagine! And five minutes after collecting everyone’s rubbish, they turned the lights off again! Why they bothered is anyone’s guess! But I wasn’t best pleased and spent the next couple of hours trying to get back to sleep, to no avail!

About the only good thing about this entire flight was the very first meal we had on boarding. Everything else about it I could write whole novels on it’s inadequacies! And one of the strangest things about the flight is that they made no attempt to acclimatise the passengers to the time difference between Lima and Madrid. On every Trans-Atlantic flight I’ve ever been on, you will get served breakfast around breakfast time in your destination country. On this flight, we were served breakfast at 1 pm Spanish time! Just one of the many failings for this journey!

We arrived in Madrid airport around 2:15pm, and decided to go through the exit and get some fresh air before our onward flight to Heathrow a couple of hours later.

The heat outside hit us like a sledgehammer! It was easily around 40 degrees Celsius, and we gasped for air more here than in the altitude of the Andes! So, very quickly, we forgo our “fresh air experience” and headed back to the safety of the air-conditioned airport!

We got onto our 27th and final flight on this trip (not counting the Nazca Lines flight) and waited for take-off.

Whilst waiting, we noticed a luggage trolley approach the plane, and be turned away. Joking that with our luck it would be our luggage on the trolley, we thought nothing more of it and sat back as the plane started its journey to Heathrow Airport.

In what seemed like a blink of an eye, we were crossing the English Channel and caught our first sight of England in over six months.

Hitting London soon afterwards, we descended on a scenic route over the Thames, taking in such sights as the Millennium Dome, Tower Bridge, the London Eye, the Houses of Parliament, Wembley Stadium and errrr…… Brentford Football Ground! And then we finally touched down at Heathrow Airport, six months, five days and several thousand miles after last being there.

And at this point, we had officially completed our circumnavigation of the planet!

So, passing through passport control, we went to get our luggage. Of course, as you would’ve no doubt guessed by now, it wasn’t there! And it wasn’t only us; there were at least fifty other people whose luggage hadn’t arrived!

We got in the line for reporting the luggage missing, which took three hours to process as they only had one staff member to deal with everybody! So, the company that had flown us “bus” style from Peru, had not only left our luggage behind in Madrid rather than risk their “on time departure” percentages but had made no provision whatsoever to deal with the amount of passengers affected, despite having been aware of this hours earlier!

And to make it worse? There were three other flights from Madrid to Heathrow, all with the same company, all half full, and they hadn’t had the decency to put any of the missing luggage onto one of these planes!

After arriving in Heathrow at 5:30pm, we finally left the baggage collection area at 9pm and went to pick up our hire car. The first one we picked had a flat battery, which wasn’t a good sign, but we swapped cars and drove to Toddington Services on the M1, reaching the Travelodge that we had last stayed at on 30th January.

And so, checking into our room, we finally completed our journey, exhausted beyond belief, more depressed than we’ve been in our lives so far, minus the majority of our luggage, but with an immense sense of achievement at having travelled Around The World In 187 Days!

As we could’ve predicted, today was a mixed bag of feelings as we both willed time to slow down to delay going home, whilst simultaneously wishing it would speed up so that we weren’t just hanging around waiting for the inevitable.

We did manage to pop back down to the Larcomar complex, buying last minute souvenirs and visiting the arcade again, but our hearts were not really in it. So we decided to take one last look at the Pacific Ocean,

and with very heavy hearts headed back to the hostel.

We’d booked an extra night in the hostel, precisely because our flight from Lima to Madrid wasn’t until the evening. This at least meant that we could kill time in the room, rather than hanging around the streets for a day. But we couldn’t even face just staying in there. We attempted a quick game of table tennis on the rooftop patio, but that just reminded us too much of the fun we’d had in Shanghai doing exactly the same, so quickly abandoned that!

So, we decided enough was enough, checked out of the hostel and waited in the reception area for a taxi

and off we went to Lima Airport, hours earlier than we’d intended but at least it was a change of scenery.

To be honest, Lima Airport isn’t too bad a place to pass time. Most of the restaurants and shops are before you enter the security control area, so you don’t have to lock yourself away in the departure terminal to pass time. And, for the first time in our entire stay in Lima, the sun broke through the cloud cover, clearing the humidity and making our last evening in Peru crisp, clear and not at all humid!

We eventually paid our airport tax and headed through to our gate.

Although by now we wanted to just get on the plane and get it over with, the weight of what was now ending for us was pretty oppressive.

But, the time to board came, and so we said farewell to the last country on our round the world trip.

The flight to Madrid was scheduled to be eleven and a half hours; the longest flight we have done in the entire six months of travelling. So it goes without saying that the plane was probably the worst we have travelled on in the entire journey. Cramped beyond belief, the seats were more like the sort you find on a double decker bus, and there was no back-of-the-seat entertainment system.

So, with the plane setting off over the Andes and heading east over Brazil towards the Atlantic Ocean, we did the only thing available to us to pass the time, and went to sleep.

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.

Enjoying our last amazing breakfast at the Casa Andina Hotel in Nazca, having had a brilliant relaxing time here,

we put on our packs for possibly the last time on this trip and walked the four blocks to the bus station.

We hadn’t had a clue how early to get here; for the first journey from Lima we’d boarded the bus half an hour early. So we decided we might as well wait at the bus station than at the hotel, and got there an hour before the bus was due. Which of course, was one hour too early as we didn’t board the bus until a minute before it was due to depart!

Still, at least we passed some time fighting off a guy in the bus depot who was determined he was going to fasten our pack cover straps up! We don’t think he was “all there” and he nearly destroyed our pack covers messing around with them, but we managed to move him away from them before any damage was done!

Getting onto the bus,

and back in our luxury VIP seats,

we settled back for the seven hour journey to Lima.

We got to see a lot more of the landscape on this journey than on the corresponding journey down to Nazca, as we passed through the main areas in daylight rather than in the pitch black. First thing of note as we left Nazca was the observation tower for the Nazca Lines, which we’d only previously seen from the air,

and then we passed mile after mile of desert landscape. We stopped at places such as Paracas

and Ica,

two very dusty towns/cities set right against a backdrop of the Pacific Ocean and large sand dunes.

If we’d been aware of these places before booking the bus back to Lima, we probably would’ve spent a night in at least one of them. But, like some other places on this round the world trip, they entered the “things to do” list for another time.

Unlike the bus ride down to Nazca, which had arrived 45 minutes late, we actually pulled into Lima Bus Terminal half an hour early! So, a very quick cab ride to Miraflores, we checked into our hostel an hour and a half earlier than we’d thought we would.

We’ve been really lucky with our hostels on this trip. Many have turned out to be the best accommodation we have stayed in, beating big chain hotels hands down. We haven’t had a bad experience with any hostel we’d stayed in. So it was slightly ironic that, for our very last place on the trip, we hit possibly one of the worst places we’ve been in on the entire trip!

It is, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a dump! It’s supposed to be a newish hostel, yet feels completely tired and worn out, there are dirt marks all over the walls, and its really just a bit crappy in general.

The laughable thing is, there is some award letter in the reception proclaiming it to be “the best hostel in South America for 2007”. I can only think that this is the equivalent of the New York café in the film Elf selling the “best cup of coffee in the world”! Because we’ve stayed in five hostels/ B&B’s in South America before this one, and every single one has beaten it hands down!

But at least it’s cheap (about £12.50 a night for a private room). And the location is right in the middle of everything in Miraflores, which means no major walking for our last hours on the trip.

Being back in Miraflores seems strange. We wish we could’ve ended the trip in the hotel in Nazca, rather than come back to Lima with it’s strange constant cloud cover and humidity. And we feel that the travelling is now over, with the only things left to do being a taxi to the airport and two flights home. But, we’re here for a couple of nights, so after six months on a near constant move we have the strange experience coming of trying to kill time for 48 hours!

One of the good things about this trip is that it’s thrown up many pleasant surprises along the way, making it much more than just achieving the “must do list” that I talked about yesterday. Well, today was one of those pleasant surprise days.

I’d watched a documentary on British TV a couple of years ago about perfectly preserved mummies in the South American desert, and was surprised to find whilst here that the documentary had been about Chauchilla Cemetery, just on the outskirts of Nazca. Mandy, having suffered my junkie-esque obsession with accumulating useless facts through documentaries for countless years, didn’t stand a hope in hell of stopping me from doing it (but then again she didn’t try to, knowing how much I wanted to see it).

Rather surprisingly, we found ourselves having a private tour. We were the only ones booked on the tour for today so, rather than occupy a minibus with just us on it, we were picked up and driven off in a battered old car, with just the driver and the tour guide (who we will called Egbert for now as we didn’t get his name!) for company.

And in yet another example of how we are the luckiest people on earth, with respect to the weather, it was a really cool morning with thick mist cover. The perfect weather for visiting and walking around a desert and the worst weather possible for seeing the Nazca Lines. In fact, had we done the Nazca Lines and Chauchilla Cemetery the other way around we would have missed out on seeing the lines, as the flights had been grounded today such was the lack of visibility!

First stop was a ceramics factory,

where we were told by Egbert the significance of some of the ancient paintings on the pottery. For example this image,

means “Monkey head coming out of snake with other heads and fishes”. Gives you a real insight into the history of the area doesn’t it!

We were then taken into the workshop area, where a man demonstrated how the pottery was made, using the same methods today as they had in pre-Incan times.

Obviously, the tour then concluded with a demonstration of “non-obligatory items for sale”. Luckily though, this was no “Beijing Silk/ Jade factory moment” (See Day 6 of the blog for details!) and the merchandise was affordable and good quality.

Happily swinging our essential holiday purchase, we got back into our rust bucket private limousine and continued onwards towards Chauchilla, veering off the sealed road onto a desert sand track fairly shortly afterwards.

After navigating the various bumps of the seven km track, the driver pulled up and we were at Chauchilla Cemetery. Paying our five Nuevo Soles entrance fee each, Egbert led us first to a small enclosed area, in which were the remains of one of the more preserved mummies in the area.

Egbert had been part of the group who took us to the airport yesterday, and both yesterday and the start of today he seemed ill at ease in his role. But, going around Chauchilla Cemetery with him, he seemed to really come into his own and you could sense he had a real enthusiasm for the subject. This started in the small enclosed area, where, after he’d told us a few basic facts about the mummy (such as it was one of the Nazca tribe and pre-dated the Inca civilisation), he proceeded to show us some photos of the landscape on the walls and explain why the geology of the area had preserved the Nazca Lines. He explained that the high iron content in the top layer of the land, while enabling lines to be drawn because of the contrast with the layer below also protected the lines from the sun by reflecting much of the UV rays back. He even demonstrated outside to us how the lines had been created.

We then started to look around the cemetery proper. A quite large area, each of the excavated graves was covered with a small, open shelter and a path led through to each of these in a circuit.

And so started a, slightly macabre, tour of lots and lots of skeletons!

There were some really fascinating insights provided by Egbert, such as the fact that the Nazca tribe practised trepanning; a method of removing part of the skull of people with head injuries to relieve the pressure and save their lives. This sort of advanced medical procedure took centuries to reach Western Medicine! There was evidence of this as well in one of the skulls we saw.

Another thing he mentioned was that the Nazca tribe practised skull deformation, elongating the skulls of senior families of the tribe by binding ropes around their heads in infancy to distinguish them from other tribes people. And again, the evidence for this was in one of the skulls.

By now, Egbert had totally relaxed with us, joking that one of his ancestors buried here was Bob Marley

and that another was an American Football player!

He was much more chatty with us, and we compared the weather in Nazca (it rains for half an hour each year!) with that of Manchester (where it’s dry for half an hour each year)! Which explains why the Nazca Lines are still there after hundreds of years and why the grass in our garden at home will probably be twenty feet high by now!

The mummies were quite fascinating to see, with much of the hair and original clothing still intact,

and the setting was completely other-worldly with the rust-coloured hills in the background and miles upon miles of desert scenery in every direction.

On finishing the last tomb, our driver picked us back up again and it was back to the desert track,

back to the hotel,

and back to another leisurely afternoon, which we’re becoming quite accustomed to!

We rounded off another great day in Nazca with a repeat performance of the brilliant meal we’d had two days ago. And then it was back to packing for the journey back to Lima tomorrow; our final place before returning home.

Almost every web site you look at for Nazca recommends that you stay for one night, see the lines the next day, and then get the hell out of there. How wrong they are! We’ve had three brilliant, relaxing and interesting days here and wish it could be more. There are lots more things we could do if we stayed longer, and it’s such an amazing area of the world.

But, after six months of endless time stretching out in front of us, time on this trip is now a commodity we’re running out of. After today, we have two more nights sleep left before we catch our plane back home.

There’s going to be tears!!