1st September - London to Lima

We arrived at Gatwick around 3 hours before departure. Check-in didn't go quite as smoothly as expected with Delta, in it's infinite wisdom, deciding that it was impossible to seat a group of 6 people together, or even remotely in the same part of the plane. To overcome the disappointment, the group embarked on some retail therapy in the Departure lounge. On arrival at the gate it was noted that I appeared somewhat nervous. One member of the group attributed this to me being a nervous flier - seemingly the concept that traveling to Peru with a group of nutters should not cause any nerves. Anyhow, we had a word with the lady on the gate and managed to get a few sets of seats together and, in fact, once on board managed to negotiate a block of 4. Lyndsey looked after me at the back of the plane, soothing nerves and chatting (continuously) with an airhostess next to her. The excitement proved too much for her, and she accidentally left all her coursework for her PGCE course on the plane in the seat pocket in front of her (this after having thrown her boarding pass to Lima in the bin).

The change at Atlanta was rapid and, again, Delta had some difficulty dealing with the concept of 6 people wanting to sit together. We had words with a lady at the desk and managed to organize some seats together on the return legs of the journey. The flight down to Lima, meanwhile, had 3 pairs of us scattered around the plane. The excitement proved too much for Lyndsey and she lost her brand new hairbrush.

Consistent with our experiences in Atlanta, we managed to choose the slowest immigration queue into Lima. Once we had our luggage and had changed the first of our Dollars into Sols, we headed out into the sea of humanity that is the arrivals hall in Lima airport. Luckily, James figured out that he had misinterpreted the Spanish e-mail from the hostel. He had planned to hold up a sign identifying himself as James Croll, however, it was pointed out that this was slightly unusual and that usually the person meeting the plane held the sign with the name on it. Checking the e-mail revealed that this was indeed the case.

Sure enough, a guy with a sign for Senor Croll was spotted and we made our way to him. He in turn led us out to our luxury courtesy bus, cunningly disguised as a beat up VW Camper van. We loaded the luggage into the boot, piled in the back and then headed off into the fury of Lima traffic by night. Our first taster of Lima driving, including jumping red lights, honking every time we changed direction or speed and using intimidation as a substitute for mirror, signal, maneuver.

We eventually arrived at a non-descript block of buildings and, after being slightly hassled for money by a little old lady, were taken into a communal stairwell and upstairs to the entrance of the Hostel. We had a 6 person room (4 beds, 1 bunk) with the bathroom a little walk down the hall. We met a German guy who had studied in Lancaster University and took a photo before then going to bed, exhausted.