2021 October - Day 11 - Peru - Travel home day.

 Our trip is coming to an end.  We’ve had a wonderful experience here in Peru coming to know a different culture, both current and ancient.  As I travel the world, you quickly realize that happiness has nothing to do with money and things you acquire.  It is all about family, working hard and finding good in the lives we are leading, no matter what the circumstances are around us.

We woke up this morning (Saturday) knowing it was going to be a very long day or set of days.  As a matter of fact, I’m writing this in the Houston airport Sunday morning.  Our day started by making the decision to try and get our Covid testing done use cell data on the floating island.  We wondered if the bandwidth would be good enough.  It turned to work just fine.  We both spent about 45 minutes total to do the test, get a negative result and get all our documentation sent to us and then uploaded into the United Travel Ready application.  For the others, we decided to wait to do their testing in Lima at the BnB that Scott had rented.  More later on that.

Once again, Joel and Lucy, our hosts prepared a nice breakfast for us.  Michelle was kind of feeling ill and was not able to eat much.  She eventually got over it as the day wore on.  But being in the high altitude really gets to you with headaches, stomach aches and so on.  Anyway, once breakfast was done, which consisted of eggs, avacado, tomato, bread and herbal tea followed by fresh Mango and Bananas, we gathered our bags and loaded them on the boat that Joel would use to take us back to the small boat launch in Puno.  But before we left, they asked us if we could have a prayer together.  They are active Seventh Day Adventists.  And they knew that we were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  I ended up trying to pray in very broken Spanish.  But it was special moment with them.

We arrived at the port around 10:30 AM hoping that our taxi service to take us from Puno to Juliaca would be there.  But it was not.  Scott checked his phone to find that the driver we had lined up was sending his wife.  Turns out he drank to much the night before and was sleeping in.  Too funny.  Anyway, it was a very new van that accommodated us nicely.  The ride to the airport in Juliaca was about an hour which cost us about $38 for all of us.  We had to be there by 12:15 as Marc and Heidi still needed to buy their tickets.  They had a reservation but could not get the credit card transaction to go through.  We arrived at about 12:00 only to find no LATAM offices at the airport.  Eventually an LATAM gate agent showed up and told him that ‘officially’, he cannot allow him to buy these tickets.  That caused a bit of a concern for these two.  In the end, because Marc is a pilot, he had listed themselves as non-revs (stand by) and the agent told them there would be enough seats.  So he looked on the system for that reservation and found it, checked them in.  And in the end, it worked out.  It also saved them `$400 or more since the non-rev seats were really cheap.

The flight to Lima was nice.  I ended up next to Scott and Michelle.  Denise was across the aisle thinking she would have a middle seat.  But…no one took the aisle.  So she was able to slide over.  The fellow next to her was an LDS tour guide named Van Evans.  He takes groups down to Peru on humanitarian missions.  He told me later that he also has a book that he has written named ‘The House of the Lord’ that explores temples ancient and new in South America.  I’ll have to check it out.  We landed in Lima around 4 PM’ish and headed to our BnB.  I say ours, but we only used it for a few hours since our flight was not until 12:45 AM.  Once we arrived there, it was Covid test time for Scott\Michelle and Marc\Heidi.  It all went pretty well except for Heidi’s.  She took the test with a proctor watching.  But after the 15 minute clock expired, the follow up Proctor never came online.  She waited over 30 minutes.  Everyone else…the 2nd proctor came online quickly and validated the test.  Anyway, we agreed to have her refresh her browser hoping it was a connection issue and sure enough, a new connection was made and quickly a Proctor was online and validated her test too.  But she was not a happy camper.  I felt bad.  But the good news, everyone tested negative and got the docs they needed to get back into the USA.

Jillian, they young gal from Sacramento that we had met and helped in Cusco, pinged us since she was coming into Lima too.  She was to be on our same flight.  So we had here use Uber to come to the BnB and go to dinner with us.  She had some cool stories of her adventure hiking the Inka Trail, a 4 day, 3 night hike to Machu Picchu.  It is a 25 mile walk that sometimes was quite grueling.  Funny though, she met another LDS family that were trekking with her.  It made her laugh.  Anyway, we all walked to a restaurant that sold ‘Pollo’ that was BBQ’d turning over a set of coals.  The portions were huge for all of us.  I think our final bill was $26 for 7 people.  So cheap.

After dinner, we retired to the BnB and played an aggressive game of ‘Golf’…a card game the Hayden’s taught us.  It was fun.  At 9:30 or so, we hailed an Uber that picked Jillian, Denise and I and took us to the airport.  Getting through the airport was straightforward, not very quick, but we made it.  Once clearing immigrations, we went to the VIP Lounge for about an hour.  It was a really nice lounge that provided a nice buffet of foods and drinks.  While there, we received notice that we had been given seats!  Yay!!!  The flight left on time and arrived about 7 AM.   But now, the prospect that we can get to SLC looks bleak.  As a matter of fact, my backup plan is to go to Boise and drive home since it is less than a  5 hour drive.  But we shall see.

Update….we waited in Houston, seeing three flights go to SLC with maybe 1 standby getting on.  More and more standby’s joined and the list was around 15 with Denise being almost at the bottom, even with a vacation pass.  In the end, I booked us to Boise at 5 PM and rented a car from Boise to SLC for $95.  That worked out.  We arrived home on Monday at around 2 PM after making the 4 hour drive.  Looking at Houston flights, we would not have got on Monday either.  So it was a good choice to go to Boise, get a hotel, get some rest and then make the drive.  It worked out great.  But such is non-rev, standby, flying.  You never know.

It was a great trip.  Glad to be home…but sad to see it end.

Pictures:

Our bags all loaded on to the small boat that Joel used to transport us to the Puno boat launch.

Along the highway from Puno to Juliaca, there was an amazing amount of these shrines for those who had been killed on this highway.  Way too many.

This is one of the streets we went down in Juliaca.  The town is full of this 3-wheel rickshaws.

This was a Llama or Alpaca transport…..

Joel and Lucy…our wonderful hosts on their floating island in Uros on Lake Titicaca.  I think I said there were over 2000 people living on floating islands in Uros.  And I was told that at one time, one-third of the people were members of the LDS church.   Joel took us to where the small chapel once was and showed us another property the church owned.  But I’m not sure what the membership is now.  And those that are members must have to go to Puno to attend church services and activities.

This was our ‘snack’ in the VIP lounge (Priority Pass) in the Lima airport.  The cute young gal is Jillian who was on our flight and spent the evening with us all at the BnB we had rented.  Scott\Michelle and Marc\Heidi were not flying until 5:45 AM and they wanted to get some sleep…so they rented a BnB near the airport for $50.

Covid testing in the BnB near the Lima airport….with me looking over their shoulders.  We did ours on the floating island.

This is the boat dock where Joel took us to and where we met our Taxi van that took us to the Juliaca airport.

This picture is us getting a bite to eat at a cafe in the Juliaca airport as we waited to go through security for our flight from Juliaca to Lima.

I believe this is us crammed into the van that took us to the Juliaca airport.  It was a new, quite nice, van.

My chicken dinner (with a salad)…for $4 (17 soles).  It was really good.  When our large group of 7 came in, the young waitress just grinned wondering what she was going to do with all these gringos.  One of the funny things was that they only had Coca Cola or Inka Cola ( a native soda) that nobody wanted.  So Marc, Scott and I walked down the street to a tienda and bought fruit juices, waters, cookies, etc for the whole group.  Only $5 for two plastic bags full of stuff.

In Juliaca, the streets were full of these little carriages.  I think someone said that in the Cusco area, they are not legal.  But in the Puno providence, they are.  And they were buzzing around everywhere in Juliaca.

This is a picture of Joel guiding the boat through small channels with large reeds on each side.  At times it was shallow and his prop would pick up floating reeds.  So he had to stop often, lift up the motor, clean the prop and then put it back into the water and re-start the engine.   Was fascinating to watch him navigate the channels in the day time.  And when we arrived, he did it in the dark of night.  Amazing.