Tokyo to Lima

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Sitting in a restaurant surrounded by palm trees, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, slurping on my fresh papaya juice, it's hard to believe that I've just trudged my way through the most hellish journey ever. The 7th of March was a very very long day, in more ways than one; for us, it lasted for 39 hours! Crossing the date line really messes with your head, and going over 40 hours with no sleep doesn't help, but we are finally recovering!

We left our hostel in Tokyo at 10am, annoyed that check-out was so early because, after an hour and a half squished on a subway and a train with our huge backpacks, we would have to hang around the airport for 5 hours. This was followed by 10 hours on a plane where both my TV screen and reading light refused to work, and where they tried to give us salmon as our vegetarian option. 'You don't eat beef, you don't eat salmon, and you don't eat sushi? Well, what do you eat?!' cried the shrill American air hostess, irritatedly dumping four salad bowls in front of me. Naturally, the salad bowls had prawn in.

17 hours after leaving our hostel in Tokyo, we arrive into Los Angeles. For some reason we can't simply transfer, we have to go through American customs and apply for a visa! They want to know what address we will be staying at while in the US; what can you say when you're only going to be in the country for 2 hours? The man seemed quite offended that we were choosing to go to Peru instead of staying in LA, but I assured him that we would be back and our visas were granted. Having queued for ages, we had to run to get our luggage and get to check-in, where they proceeded to tell us that our tickets had been exchanged. Exchanged for what?! They didn't know, and I had images of being stranded in LA while our luggage went on to Peru. But after messing around on their computers for a while, they finally decided to let us fly, and we ran through security, practically having to strip down to our underwear to go through the metal detectors, and then we rushed to the plane.

From LA it was a 9 hour journey, and the second we took off, the people in front of us decided to recline their seats all the way back. For the entire journey. Fantastic. Three films, a documentary, and an episode of X-Files later, we had landed in Lima, where we had to queue for a further hour to get our visa. We had arranged for a pick-up from the airport to our hotel, but of course there was nobody there. We wanted to ring the hotel, but we had no change, and when I went to buy drinks, the notes we had were too large for them to change. It took a lot of messing around, but finally we got in touch with the hotel, who said that they would check and could we call them back in a few minutes. Getting more and more irritated, we did as they asked, and they assured us that somebody would be there in 10 minutes. 20 minutes later somebody comes, and we head into central Lima for our hotel. By now, it is 2am and we haven't slept for 40 hours. We check-in, crawl up the stairs and head straight to bed.

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Comments

[Mum]

Safely there
Glad you are safely there - even if its after such a long journey - travelling is not much fun. Enjoy your special drinks - hope the juices are brill and can make up for the bad food!! Love Mumxxxx

[Deborah]

*hugs*
I hope the rest of Peru improves things, and at least once you get to the USA there won't be any flying for a fair while. That journey sounds truly horrendous. :-(

[quds]

poor u...
Well, i hope Lima is worth all that faffing about!!! make sure u have loads of fun and make up for the stressful journey...

[Dad and Stella]

Lima
Nice to speak to you earlier today and glad to see that you are both resting. Hope it does not get too hot for you. Bring me back a frog, pity you have another early morning flight but it will be worth it. Love from Dad and Stelxx