Hello Mums!
And Dads, who are likely now having this read aloud to them. Also hello to anyone else who has also subscribed to this blog and is now reading back through older posts. I know it’s a bit presumptuous to assume that we will be accruing more subscribers as our travelling unfolds, but it’s good to aim high. Build it and they will come etc. etc. but for now I’m working on the theory that the only people reading this at present are our parents. (And Steven, Katy just yelled across the room that you are subscribed, Hello! Katy here, I’ll be in bold for this one)
It’s currently about 6:30 (5 hours behind the UK, whose time my laptop is defiantly sticking to, British time for British laptops!) and we’ve just got back to our little room; an air BnB in a converted garage with a bathroom attached (this description undersells it, but not by a huge stretch). It’s basic, but is clean and has a surprisingly comfortable bed! Well, it was comfortable last night, but we had just been travelling for the last 26 hours so by that point a bed of nails would have seemed comfortable. Tonight will be the acid test!
We finally got here at 1:30am after landing in Lima at the stroke of midnight (about 5 am UK time). Katy had had the foresight to pre-book us a taxi with the wonderfully named ‘Gringo Taxis’, owned and operated by a lovely chap called Walter from New York who emigrated here about 3 years ago. Very enjoyable guy to talk to, he told us about all the places in Lima you DEFINITELY SHOULD NOT GO, and also said to never get your phones out in public and, if possible, get your cash out of your wallet via osmosis so as to avoid opening up your bag. He then told us about 2 customers of his last week who, in only a few days, had had 2 phones and $900 stolen from them. All very useful stuff to know, but in our sleep deprived state and in the dead of night driving around the streets of a foreign city, somewhat unsettling. Our contribution to this cultural exchange was teaching him the utility of the word ‘prat’ as a descriptor of those who leave their valuables on display (There is a lot of crime here, but it is mostly opportunistic, so as long as you’re not being ‘a prat’ you’ll usually be ok).
Overall, though, it was a pleasant way to round off what had been a very long and tiring journey (from here on in I’ll stick to UK time just to make things a bit easier). We’d set off from Dorset at about 4:45am arriving at Heathrow just after 7 for our first flight of 9.5 hours to Houston departing at 10am. This flight was barely a quarter full and was just about as positive an experience as a long haul economy class experience can be. With so few passengers there was room to spread out and we pretty much each had our own personal flight attendant, as they were almost tripping over themselves looking for things to do. They were lovely, brilliant, can’t stress that enough, really friendly and professional and happy to offer us the good stuff usually reserved for the business and first class passengers. It was a smooth flight across the north Atlantic and we got gorgeous views of the Greenland Ice sheet and Northern Canada as well as seeing much of central USA under a light blanket of snow. Descending in to Houston was a breeze and the landing was so smooth Katy didn’t even realise we had touched down (pah! I think the massive sigh of relief and the fact that my shoulders descended from around my ears for the first time in 9.5 hours would have been a bit of a giveaway), a little ahead of schedule at about 7:20pm. We then taxied across what felt like half of Texas to the terminal (Planners for Heathrow must fantasize of having this kind of space to plonk an airport on; runways as far as the eye can see and not a NIMBY in sight). After disembarking we made haste to US customs as, unlike what one might expect, connecting passengers don’t go straight through but have to enter the US, then re-enter the airport for their onward flight, and it was a pretty tight turn around for our flight to Lima, departing just over 2 hours later at 10pm.
Now is probably as good a time as any to explain the name of this Blog post, so let’s further chop-up the chronology of this post and re-wind a further 24 hrs. There I was, lying on the Bed, packing pretty much finished, lists checked off, i’s dotted and t’s crossed, Katy getting the last of her bits together ready for our early start the next day, and whilst double-checking for the 20th time that we were definitely right about not needing to do anything in advance for passing through Peruvian customs, I casually wondered if we would be passing through any kind of checkpoint in the USA (Mainly, I wanted to know if we’d be getting a stamp in our passport to say we’d been there, nerd that I am). This was when I discovered, with that horrible cold sinking feeling that, not only would we be passing through customs (and getting a stamp, so that’s nice) that we needed something called an ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorisation) before travelling to a US airport, and that it is strongly recommended that we apply for it at least 72 hours before we depart.
“Ummm, Katy” I sheepishly said. The panic in my voice was obviously readily apparent as she just looked at me and said, alarmed “Oh God what’s wrong”? “I think we might have a problem” I continued, before explaining what I had just read. After a quick Google search to make certain that we weren’t exempt as we were connecting, the realisation that, after all the work and saving we’d done for the last year, after all the planning and checking and double checking Visa requirements and reading travel advice that we’d missed something so big and so critical was sinking in.
All hope was not lost though, from reading blogs by other travellers who’d made the same oversight as us, it was clear that whilst it can take up to 72 hours to process an ESTA application, more often that not it was done in minutes. To action stations then! Katy was straight on to the US Customs and Border Patrol Website to fill in the application. Photos of Passports were taken, ridiculous questions about importing livestock and handling explosives were answered.
I made tea. (Earl grey. Hot)
One of the sections that needed filling in related to current or previous employers, with my previous employer being registered at ‘The Old Potato Yard’. Katy was using her phone to do the application, and Android decided that there’s no reason you’d need to use the word ‘Potato’ when an Emoji would do the job just as well. Well no, Android. Not in this instance! Not when the difference between the word ‘potato’ and and an emoji of a Potato might also be the difference between us being able to enter the USA or not.
It was a very tense 10 minutes or so, but after refreshing the page about 40 times, there it was! Our approved ESTA Form! Everything was back on track, and the relief was tremendous.
It will come as no surprise, of course, that once we actually got to US customs, nobody asked to see the bloody thing! But better safe than sorry. Clearing US customs was time consuming,but fairly straightforward, with the exception of being thrown by the passport control officer asking what the name of the airport is in Lima, (to which Katy Answered Hugo Chavez, not the best answer that could given, but as the airport is called Jorge Chavez it’s an understandable error). We made our way back through security just to re-enter the airport we had already been in anyway, got on the silly train (a replica of the silly train at Stansted) and headed to our gate.
There’s no good way to lead in to this; Houston Airport is weeeeird. Somehow the fact that it’s all in English makes it weirder; at least in a non-English speaking foreign country you expect things to be different, but when everything is in English the little differences really stand out, it’s like being in an alternate universe rather than just an alternate country. Everything is that bit bigger, that bit shinier, that bit more in your face, the forced friendliness of the advertising is that bit more pronounced, the goods and services are than bit more overpriced, the contempt with which the PA announcer chases down passengers late for boarding is that bit more overt.
There aren’t the usual banks of seats arranged around departure boards, instead there’s rows of tables at various heights with sizeable (by European standards) chairs all bolted to the floor forcing you to face towards your own individual ipad. I’ve never seen so many ipads in my life, they are literally everywhere! There’s seemingly not a single seat in the airport that doesn’t have an ipad docked 8 inches from your face, each one blinking and flashing adverts at you and trying to squeeze every cent it can out of you whilst you’re in its grasp. I may have left my anti-capitalist socialist days (so he says!!) behind me, but boy did this have the grotesque overtones of dripping corporate excess and late stage capitalism. It was like something out of Black Mirror.
Our second leg then, the flight from Houston to Lima. Another 6 and a half hours. Sadly this time we didn’t have the plane to ourselves, and the flight attendants didn’t have quite the same friendly professional air to them. 1 of them was positively matron-esque getting very short with passengers when they wanted to put their cabin luggage in the locker above their seats, not one on the other side of the aircraft. Annoyingly she didn’t have quite the same disdain for the weirdo who kept walking up and down the plane really slowly when the seatbelt signs were on (he looked like April’s weird goth friend from Parks and Recreation). Shout out though to the flight attendant who found us some vegetarian meals when they thought they only had chicken left, she was good.
And that brings us up to today. I was going to talk about our first day in Lima, but I think that’s enough for now, there wasn’t a huge amount to write home about anyway, so we’ll wrap that up in to the next post. Katy’s fallen asleep now (no surprises there…) and I think it might be time to join her. All our love to everyone back in the UK, and we’ll keep you posted with our adventures soon enough.
Nos Vemos las proxima vez!
Katy and Dave Avoid Adulthood 