competition answer!

it's the moment you've all been waiting for, the announcement of the competition answer of what happened to us 2 saturdays ago...

and the answer is - in a nutshell - we missed our flight from lima to guatemala, and had to buy a new one which was very expensive. (the other option was stay in lima for 4 more days, which believe me you would not want to do).

in a non-nutshell, and to make a short story longer, here are the details (look away if you are not interested and just want your prize money, which actually has been embezzled by the guatemalan government, sorry!):

got a taxi to the airport at 6am, got to airport at 630am - flight left at 1030am so we were the first people to check in for it. had leisurely airport breakfast, looked at the shops leisurely, went leisurely on the internet, because obviously we had loads of time, having arrived so stupidly early for our flight. got in immigration queue at 10am having done all these leisurely things, and realised boarding time was 10am, but thought it would be ok as it can't possibly take that long to get through immigration. well it can, and even if you tell 5 different airport officials that your flight leaves in 10 minutes, this doesn't seem to get you fast tracked through, they just kept saying you'll be fine, and we kept believing them. we strained our ears to see if they were announcing our names, but nothing was announced. got through immigration at 1022, sprinted to our gate... to be told el avion se fue. i thought this was a joke, but quite clearly it wasn't. we ranted and raved in english and spanish but nothing helped. so we very very very unwillingly bought a new flight, which went via el salvador, where we had a nice bagel and milkshake (trying to make this into a positive) and sprayed some nice perfume on ourselves from a duty free shop to make things seem better. waited 3 hours for our connecting flight, which was only another 30 minutes. abi closed the blinds on the plane saying she didn't like flying at night much, and i prayed that the turbulence was nothing to do with the recent hurricanes on their way to new orleans. some fat men sitting to our left laughed at me when i yelped at a really bad bit of turbulence. we whispered to each other that there seemed to be an obesity problem in guatemala and gave them evil looks. on landing abi undid the blinds and said guess what i saw out of the window lu?? ooo what do tell me? a massive massive storm and loads of lightning!! great! what a day. in case you don't know, flying is my absolute worst thing in the world.

anyway, it isn't nice to be re-living the most awful day of our trip yet, so i will stop here for today. would have blogged yesterday but a massive tarantula crept into the internet room so i suddenly had to leave very quickly, screaming. adios.