It’s a little hard to believe but today is the day our South American adventure begins! I was looking back this morning at the emails between our travel agent Natalie and I, the planning for this started with our first enquiry in Nov 2014. That seems so long ago now. Here we are some 19 months later and our journey begins tonight with a 36 hour trip to Lima. We lose Monday completely due to travel and crossing the International Date Line, so by the time we arrive it will be Tuesday evening. Seems crazy to think that we’ll be on the go for that long but that’s the joy of travel.
We’ve said before, and I suppose in this case it becomes more relevant, travel is about the destination it’s about the whole journey. Our first proper holiday to Sabah was in 2006, that started with adventures at the airport in KL where we made the ‘mistake’ of going through to see where our connecting flight went from, only to discover we are stuck then in the domestic terminal for the night. That was great fun, not, all the food outlets closed, they were doing maintenance on the lights, CNN was on a two hour loop and we had constant announcements in 5 languages of every incoming and outgoing flight. At the time it drove us crazy, now it’s a great memory from the trip.
Our first trip to Bangkok saw us meet the the ‘Friendly Stranger’, who managed to con us into thinking he was helping us. What he was doing was lining his pockets as he passed us on to his helpful tuk-tuk driving buddy. From here we met Captain Riverboat and enjoyed his part of the con as he took us down river via the local floating village and it’s nefarious characters. All up this con cost us a few dollars and ended up with Helen getting a first hand look at the Bangkok Hospital. We must say this is a first class establishment with great service and they ensured Helen was all sorted for our flight the following morning to Koh Samui. Again another party of the memory of travel.
So as we start this our next and probably biggest adventure we look forward to the journey and memories that will be created. Then in true Simon and Helen form while away we will start planning for 2017…..