THURSDAY, JUNE 14, 2018
EN ROUTE TO CENTRAL AND SOUTH AMERICA
As journeys go, this one was both long and interesting. Llew and I awoke at 5.00 am, were in our rented car at 5.30 am, at JFK airport at 6.45 am, retuning our car, taking the airport shuttle and arriving at the counter for our COPA Airlines flight at 7.00 am. One long check-in line later (during which we hooked up with our travel companion, Blair Williams) and we were ready to take flight.
On time, at 9.45 am, we were airborne for the first lap of our trip to Lima, Peru. It was pleasant to follow the route map and discover that we were flying directly above Cuba that was easily visible below us as were several smaller Caribbean Islands. We had a transit stop at Panama City in Panama where we treated ourselves to drinks in an airport bar and hot broccoli-cheddar soup and ice-cream. Back on a second flight, we boarded at 6.45 pm. local time and arrived at Lima, Peru at 10.30 pm.
From that point, things got pretty hairy. Our daughter Chriselle was supposed to arrive from Los Angeles an hour later. We figured we could request the driver of the taxi that had been arranged for us, to wait for an hour and take Chriselle along with him (and us) to the airport. But the driver refused to wait (arguing that waiting charges would accrue as would parking charges). Our Spanish was non-existent as was his English. Between the two of us, we had a tough time getting any messages through. To make matters worse, Chriselle’s flight was delayed by a half hour and we soon discovered that she had another taxi waiting to pick her up. And her baggage took a whole hour to arrive! Long story short, our entrance into Peru was not the most uneventful. Still, about 12.30 am, we finally had a reunion with Chriselle with whom I rode in her taxi to our hotel (with Llew and Blair following in a second one for which we paid a handsome penalty fee) and only checked into Suites Larco (our hotel) at about 1.30 am—by which time we were well and truly knackered.
At the check-in counter we were informed that our dear friends The Bhagat Family—Mukarram, wife Shahnaz, son Hasan and daughter Azra—who had flown in from New Jersey, two days previously (via Bombay, India) had made independent plans to visit the famous Nasca Lines themselves and would not be joining us on our city sight-seeing trip, the next day.
Until manana, adios...
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