The morning started far, far too early. My alarm went off at 4:20 and I dragged my eyelids open to find the world dark and silent. I stumbled into the clothes I had carefully laid out the night before and grabbed the two packs I had spent a week carefully planning and packing. The day was finally here. I was leaving for a five week trip to Peru, four of which would be volunteering in Ayacucho, a remote and impoverished city, and the last week traveling the sacred valley.
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| The DIA stallion at dawn |
Both my mum and my dad had gotten up to take me down to the airport and as we left the house we found my cat with a baby bunny rabbit in her mouth. We then spent an unexpected fifteen minutes chasing the cat chasing the bunny rabbit who had managed to free itself before I unceremoniously threw the cat into the house and slammed the door. See you in a month!
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At DIA we meet up with my friend Alison who would be doing this trip with me, and we said goodbye to our parents and they left. Alison described it best by saying it felt like we were being kicked from the nest and we were going to have to learn to fly. All by ourselves we had our first scare when we miscalculated the flight time and showed up to the gate only to see the last five passengers remaining to still get on the flight! Yikes!
The journey to Peru would take over 25 hours. The first leg was Denver to Houston then a five hour layover there followed by a seven hour flight to Lima followed by another five hour layover in Lima followed by another one hour flight to Ayacucho. It was bad enough already but for unlucky Alison and I we had just run a half marathon the day before and our sore legs protested the confined position the entire way.
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| Before and after the half marathon |
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| Alison even won first in our age group with a blistering time of 2:05! |
Another scare happened when we got on the seven hour Lima plane assuming we would be fed dinner only to hear over the announcements that a light breakfast would be served in FIVE hours. Mortified and starving we dug around in our bags and pulled out a few granola bars, needing to eat a lot because of the run. But just as we'd given up hope a trolley trundled past with that unmistakable reheated mush scent. It turned out the announcement had been a miscommunication and we savored every bite of what we were told was chicken and rice.
In Lima airport our bags were no less than in the last five to appear out of a plane of 300 passengers and we were sure they were lost, but they arrived and just like that we were finally in Peru! And I was unceremoniously welcomed into the culture by getting yelled at by a cleaning lady in the bathroom reminding me that they don't put toilet paper in the toilet in this country. Oops.
The five hour layover in Lima was also the hardest. We arrived at 11 at night and, not being able to check in until 3 in the morning we also couldn't fall asleep on the hard floor of the public check-in wing. Instead we played card games to keep ourselves awake that slowly declined in mental capacity as we grew ever more exhausted, first it was poker, then crazy eights, then go fish, then war. By the end we were struggling to figure out which card was higher.
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| Yucca chips |
Alison tried some fried yucca chips we found in the airport. We also had a sandwich which we think was alpaca meat because that definitely was not chicken!
We went through security and found our gate but still managed to turn a five hour layover into a close call when Alison remembered she had to buy water for her motion sickness medication last minute and we rushed onto the bus to take us to the plane.
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We were expecting small but not a propeller plane! As we sat down on the tiny plane with the twenty other passengers and experienced one final 30 minute airport delay, it seemed even less truthful than at the start of the journey that we were really going to Ayacucho!
