Travel days can be quite tedious, and this one takes the biscuit! From an early pickup at 06:45 we’re not expecting to hit the hay again until 03:00 next day. Fortunately our lovely travel agent always books a car for four as she knows how lightly we pack – the car that arrives is tiny (but does have four passenger seats) and our cases have to go on the roof!
Our routing leaves a lot to be desired, but there is just no other way of doing the journey – so we fly from the East coast of South America all the way to the West coast, and then 2/3 of the way back! Lucky for me I have my very own sun-god to keep me happy.
The journey from hotel to airport is so easy compare to the incoming, only at the building site do we hit a bottleneck, so we have ages to wait, at least it’s entertaining with a very vocal gang of football supporters!
Flying out of Cusco we are treated to some great views of the region and mountains. Then we have a good while to wait in Lima, but not enough to warrant an expedition, so after exiting and re-entering to deal with immigration we while away time in the lounge.
The food on Latam has been unexpectedly good – this is the best fillet I’ve had in the air since the early naughties when Austrian Air used to have a chef onboard just make sure your steak was perfect – imagine the cost of that nowadays?
In São Paulo we have to find our bags and go through re-checking them for our final flight. It’s dark now and there is nothing exciting to photograph.
This final leg were are very tired but don’t want to sleep yet, so manage to get through four episodes of Below Decks – a guilty pleasure – and a great way to keep on going!
We finally land in Manaus about 02:30 and then wait ages for our baggage – one naughty suitcase always manages to get separated from the others. Once again it’s a small car, a VW Jetta, so this time we have baggage on our laps for the manic journey, passing through red-lights and no-stop roundabouts whilst holding our breath.
