Peru - Friday 9 October 1998
Everything is wrong right from the beginning. Chaos, stress, delays.... that's what is needed to start a succesfull holiday, is my experience. Nothing of it. Everything is well-organized and normal. I really hope that isn't a bad sign...
At half past four in the morning it's always hard to get up. On the beginning of a holiday it's a little bit easier...
Only fog could give problems. But on our way to Schiphol Airport we don't meet any problems with it. Our plane appears to have arrived without any problems too.
Strange: I thought Schiphol is a modern airport where you get into the planes through a slurf . Now, we go by bus! But it's nice, on the center of the airport platform climb onto the stairs of our plane.
Our Transavia plane to London has very little windows. We can't see anything through them. Goodbye beautiful start of our holiday. We even couldn't weave goodbye to the cities of Haarlem, Hoofddorp and Amsterdam.
Our flight to Houston was better. London-Gatwick-airport is in the middle of nowhere between woods and fields. I think it's quite a distance to the centre of the city. In our plane we can see -between the tv-programs- all the time where we are, how high, and what distance we still have to fly.
Houston appears to have a small airport. We have to wait in a transit room. There are only five people waiting there, waiting to go to Lima. Later, we're also joined by some travelers to Paris. There is really nothing to do! We buy a hot-dog and some coffee.
Our plane to Lima appears to be quite filled. A lot of people from other planes, probably. We depart at 3.30 PM local time, we have to fly for another six hours then. We can watch another movie.
The film, Primary Colors, is about president Clinton (in the movie he's called 'Stanton') en all affairs he has, even during his election campaign. I'm too tired to watch whole movie, but I can see it is quite realistic.
We can watch a beautiful sunset.
Now, I am already disliking those airplane-food.
We arrive at 10 PM in Lima. What a chaos! Everybody is running through each other, yelling all the time. We change our money and don't have any idea where to go. I make a phone call to the hotel mentioned in our brochure. On the phone is someone of Tucan Travel who knows who we are...
The taxi that brings us to our hotel for $ 18, drives like crazy! The driver doesn't use his brakes, he only claxons and drives... fast! He also passes other cars on their right side... and go to another road on the left side right after it.
It's really nice to see how a drive in a taxi can bring you in a local atmosphere. We can see all kinds of parts of Lima and of course we listen to a local radio station with Spanish music.
Our hotel is really beautiful. We have a room for four persons.
Around 1 AM we fall asleep.
