Sunday 17 January 2010
Highlights: Ballestas Islands (penguins & sea lions)

After a hot night in which I slept above the covers with barely anything on, we got up early to visit the Ballestas Islands home of penguins and sea lions. This 3 hour boat trip was enjoyable especially when a sea lion swam very close to the boat.

On our return we did a quick supermarket stop to buy our breakfast and lunch needs. Kate organised for bread and cheese so when we caught the local bus to Lima we were all set. In terrible news my headsets stopped working; I must get a replacement soon. The bus seemed to have an Eric Bana marathon on with Black Hawk down and then Troy on, all in Spanish but still worth watching.

We arrived at our hotel at 3 pm and I immediately started burning DVDs of everyone’s photos to share with the group. This worked out to be 4 DVDs per person. The hotel looked fantastic – too bad me and Andrew won’t be staying despite the room book and paid as part of the trip for tonight.

Edgar organise a taxi for a pick up at 9.30 pm to the airport. The group went out for on final dinner which was fun, especially our travel stories – this was indeed a great group. I wrote in Emma’s, Kelly’s and Shrina’s diaries and I hope my strong positive feelings came across.

Sadly we said goodbye to everyone for a final time (except Karen who we’ll catch up with in LA). I offered our room to Kate for the night – it might as well be used by someone after all and gave Edgar our tip for his great efforts.

The taxi got us to the airport and I was very happy to get our boarding passes after the earlier problems that made me cancel our original flight to Miami and fly a day later once visa issues were fixed.

Strictly speaking the Oneworld Round the World ticket was now invalid but it still worked!! After a mix up that saw us sent between two different lounges Andrew and me settled down to some drinks and discussions about the amazing journey we had finished in South America.