So this is just a quick blog entry to let you know about the other side of year long holidays. You see it's not all beautiful places, exciting activities and amazing people (although yes most of it is). But it is also very trying days like this. Enjoy...

So we had a great few final days with Rach and Joel we visited a desert, went sandboarding (narly) drank lots of pisco wine and sailed round some islands viewing incredibly wildlife - did you know that seals stink? But unfortunately it soon came time to leave, R & J back to the UK and P & P off to Argentina. Some excellent planning however meant we could travel to the airport together with flights only an hour behind. We say ´airport` what we actually mean is ´hell on earth´. Peru international airport is woefully bad, a true demonstration of illogical queuing, overpriced junk food and ridiculous bureaucracy. Just writing about it now actually makes me rather tense. Anyway this is acceptable as we are leaving right? erm.... no, no we're not.

We actually made it onto our plane on time, however we then sat on the runway for three hours before being unloaded back to our gate - it was misty. So we suffered a rubbish night's sleep on hard plastic chairs with neon lights blaring in our eyes. We thought that R & J had managed to take off until 6 in the morning a tired looking Joel appeared - their flight had also been delayed.

Look, mist happens we know this and it wasn't Taca´s fault (that's our airline Taca). However at 6.00am Taca decided to fix the problem of lots of bodies in the departure lounge by ...cancelling the flight. What you can't just cancel the flight!!!! Anyway turns out you can. A truly farcical morning then ensued which involved us (and a lot of Peruvians) being escorted back through customs and immigration back into the main bit of the airport. To round things off when we were going back through customs they returned everyone's tourist cards (that's the legal identification that lots of South American countries make you carry with your passport). Except of course the muppets at Lima International Airport had lost Polly´s. Their solution was brilliantly hilarious ... they faked one including back dating stamps etc.

Anyway we were eventually booked onto another flight leaving 24 hours after we were supposed to. So there we go it's not all glitz and glam you also get the odd day like this: painful, frustrating and no we're not yet laughing about it. Although there is an extra twist to the story…all this happened two weeks ago when you may remember the world was gripped in another health scare (whatever happened to SARS by the way?). So yes it was swine flu time - this gave the whole day an extra twist because half the people in the airport were walking round in facemasks (like a welder's conference or something, or the Hannibal Lector appreciation society). The facemasks and signs about Swine Flu (which by the way I think they'd just dug out last years and crossed out the word ´bird) gave the whole think a slightly ill feeling really not the place to spend a night not sleeping.

The face masks were also immensely pointless (like the airport itself really). You see when our flight was cancelled lots of people decided to shout at each other. When you shout in a silly little mask it's hard to make yourself understood, so the staff and passengers would lift up their masks to shout in the face of the people next to them, then once their point was made they would replace their masks safe in the knowledge that they were swine flu free. The world is full of idiots.