Paris to London to Peru and now it's time to relax (Matt is officially a British citizen + Inga gets her DJ wings)

Six thousand, seven hundred and forty five kilometres later and we had made it back to London... five nights before we bust out to Peru and the next iteration of our midlife crisis wonderful world tour... anyway, it was now time to enjoy London, relax, catch up with friends and then head off to South America... ooooohhh waaaaiit, no, no, no, no it wasn't. We had so much to do in the next five days that it boggled the mind just to think about it.

Let's see: sort out our car full of crap and put all the camping stuff into storage, repack a bunch of storage stuff (why and how do we now have three hundred and forty kilograms of junk boxed up and in storage??!?), clean and sell the car (a left hand drive car in a right hand drive country!), Matt's citizenship ceremony in darkest South London (okay, Greenwich), get malaria medicine, final haircuts, last minute purchases (clothes etc) for the next six months in coast, jungle and high mountains in South America.

Let's get to it I suppose...

(the photo above shows the trip odometer at only 744.8km... seriously: why would the Fiesta's trip odometer revert back to zero every two thousand kilometres? Anyone? That makes no sense at all - it has room to show 9,999.9 digits! I'm sure some engineer somewhere thought that would be a good idea. Weird)

After eight years, multiple bordering-on-extortion visas and forms, and a very very long wait for his latest zillion-page, thousand pound+ naturalisation application to be approved, Matt was now an official UK citizen. Ha haaa, nah, just kidding, nothing is that 'easy' in the UK. Almost though. One last thing remained: to go chill with the Queen at the 'local' town hall. Leaving over an hour early, a thirty five minute drive from Hackney to Greenwich soon turned into a five hour drive thanks to some choice London traffic.

Luckily, and in a particularly non-British-procedural turn of events, the Greenwich Townhall folks kindly agreed to run Matt's ceremony even though he turned up over three hours late! After a rousing chorus of God Save the Queen, a declaration of faithfulness and loyalty to the crown and some signing of documents, Matt was, now, finally, an official citizen of Britain. The next step was a British passport... which can only be applied for when in the UK, so it may be a while till Matt gets that!

On one of the nights when we weren't running around like headless chickens, and we had managed to get some 'friend time' (pub time), Inga was granted yet another name in the cycle of cool. Inga now had a DJ name - 'Anga'. 'DJ Anga'. It's not very often that a mere human being is provided with both a rap name ('Samples Moon') as well as a DJ name, and even rarer for these to be granted within the space of only a few months. Cool - super cool, DJ cool dude even.

With London out of our system, at least for the present time, it was time to move on. So we did it in style. Matt forgot that he had upgraded our short hop to Madrid to fancy-class with airpoints care of Mercer, so we weren't quite sure what was happening when we were directed to the luxurious part of the plane and plied with Champagne! Lovely, juvley, bubbley...

We landed in Lima in the early hours and made our way through the honkingly loud and crazily busy traffic to Kaclla, The Healing Dog Hostel. Kaccla is a type of strange hairless Peruvian dog that was once used by ancient Andean peoples as a cure for ailments such as rheumatism (cuddle the funny, warm hairless dog!). The hostel's Kaclla had a particularly ridiculous look, whereby it couldn't figure out how to get it's tongue back in it's mouth, so most of the time half of it poked out, looking like something directly out of a cartoon.

A combination of jetlag, exhaustion and Matt deciding to get sick again meant that we hung around in the hostel, not doing a whole lot of anything for a few days. We did manage to eat in a few Lima restaurants and also have one nice day out to Museo Larco and to the National Archaeology and Anthropology Museum where we got to see some amazing Peruvian gold, weaving and pottery, including a whole bunch of weird-as-hell sexy-time pottery.

(yeeeaah, so that one of the right, that's a... vagina-face statue, that is, and the other dead-looking things, well, yep, they're doing exactly what it looks like they're doing, yeeeeep...)

We had decided to hole up somewhere, slow down, catch up and relax for a while. Colombian Dave had told us about this neat little surfer village on the beach in northern Peru, called Huanchaco, near Trujillo (Peru's second biggest city). Even better, Inga's mad interwebbing skills had found this great looking place called Casa Amelia... and it looked like we had mined some pretty sweet-as Peruvian hostel gold. As Ben would say, this is the business, or as Saroja would say, yeah yeah yeah. Time to calm it all down a bit and relax, chillax and all the other axes... nice.

Even better, the hostel manager was heading back to Europe for a visit home, so the hostel was going to be given over to a very few lucky people for an extended stay. We had a damn fab bunch of Germans, a Czech-man and an Englishman to spend the next three weeks in super cheap, beach heaven. It was all shaping up to be exactly what the doctor had ordered. According to our 'rental agreement', we could even decide to let a few other special people join the commune to help subsidise our already very cheap rent.

Faaab-you-louse.... ahhhhhhhhhhh....... sun, surf, cold beers and nodding off to the relaxing sound of the sea.

(our friendly cat and bunnies, and the so very not friendly parrot - the little bugger hates women in general, and really likes attacking men's toes)

Oh, and, TIME TO LEARN MORE CASTELLANO! (Spanish)... esta bien. voy a trabajar en la mañana.

Gay Paree, Stef, Vanessa and our boisterous godson Jack!

The eight hundred kilometre drive north to Paris passed without any major motorway hiccups - eight hours plus or minus a bit of tootling, but, again, with significantly lighter pockets due to tolls. 

We did get into a slight altercation at one of the motorway toll booths where an absolute delight of a Spanish woman was screaming and swearing at us, at the top of her lungs, with her back seat full of children, and her husband in the driver's seat looking like he was taking a vacation from his body whilst driving (and yet, somehow still managing to jam his BMW in front of all the other cars). Multiple motorway lanes were merging into single toll booth lanes, and this friendly family had decided that they owned this specific toll booth lane, and that no one else in the entirety of France was permitted to use it! Always nice seeing parents set such nice examples for their children, eh?

Anyway. Where were we. Ahh, that's right... Paris, la ville de l'amour. Also known as: a hot, car covered, dirty, stinky and fume-ridden city, just like any big city anywhere. But we were lucky to be able to spend almost a week with the always fantastic cousin Stef & Vanessa, and of course our delightfully cheeky godson Jack. We also got to catch up again with Stef's friend Craig who was visiting for a few days from NZ. 

Knowing it is one of Matt's favourites, and that Craig was a Raclette-virgin, Stef and Vanessa broke out the Raclette machine for us all... mmmm... melted French cheese on top of potatoes, yummy French bread, meat and veges... soo good. 

At least it wasn't as hot as during our previous visit in 2014... where Matt internally combusted from the heat but still insisted on inflicting the heater-like Raclette maker on us all (So good, so cheesy). Raclette is one reason for Matt not to live in France - he'd end up spherical!... although then he would fit perfectly into that spherical hole in the 'love hotel' mattress back in Turin... maybe this was fate?

Vanessa's talk of tartare (raw minced horse meat mixed up with stuff like raw eggs, onions, capers, ground pepper and Worcestershire sauce) over our previous visits had got Inga all aquiver to try some out... so Vanessa rocked out her French culinary skills and whipped up a fabulous batch of horse tartare for the gang, (whilst Matt the mostly-vegetarian watched on with mild disgust). Seemed to go down the hatch pretty well!

(mmmm... soo cheesy and soo horsey...)

Our boisterous godson Jack was just over a year old now - and growing up fast. It was good to see his papa keeping it real with one of Jack's first words being zizi :) (French for willy!). We had lots of fun with our French family wandering the streets of Paris, talking and catching up, drinking wine, visiting the 'Fondation Louis-Vuitton' park, chasing chickens (!) and just hanging out.

(this was an off-feeding session - Jack actually really liked being fed by Inga and vice versa!)

(yeah, tough pose Matt, tough, reeeaal tough)

A Château, a storm and 130 paper lanterns: Tamlyn and Sami get hitched in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of Southern France

Fourteen hundred kilometres and twenty hours later, we had arrived in Southern France, close to the city of Carcassonne and its fairytale castle & medieval citadel (now, Carcassonne is a good board game, right, amirite??).

Tamlyn and Sami had chosen Château La Villatade, booking out the whole place as the location for the week's festivities and where they would tie the 'official' wedding knot. And what an amazing of location! The place had a beautiful little spring-fed swimming pool, rolling French hills covered in leafy grape vines, an old Château with an inner courtyard surrounded by the rooms and a huge barn, and, of course, a donkey, just for Inga.

Soooooo, then Matt went and got sick and had to hang out in bed for a couple of days. Of course. Typical. And it started to look a bit sad on the wedding weather front... the forecast was threatening rain, rain, rain and more rain, right through to the day of the wedding. During the week we even had some torrential downpours with astounding thunder and lightning storms - lightning so intense that the sky was almost constantly lit with electricity. The Château courtyard flooded. Matt's brand new camera was outside and in the rain in an open bag (a couple of days in the hot water cupboard seemed to fix it though, phew!). Forecasts were checked hourly and every single finger was crossed twice and maybe even thrice.

(this is what the French heavens were still showing us, well after the storm had passed: the thunder had quietened and the light show had dissipated - still rather impressive nonetheless!)

Thankfully, the violent weather had exhausted itself and the sky had cleared by the morning of the wedding. Apart from a few lacklustre and late spits wandering between the clouds, it seemed that Tamlyn and Sami had been given a good weather pass by the gods of torrents & deluges.

The London gang kicked off a working bee (some of the ladies were much better at the early start than the gents!) and we started setting the wedding decoration plans in action: one hundred and thirty Chinese paper globe lanterns were to be built, then strung-up around the wedding glade, pool and Château courtyard, carpet had to (arrive first!) be unrolled and tested out, tables and chairs had to be arranged and last but not least, Matt's best man speech needed a few final tweaks. What had seemed like 'just another amazing French vineyard' was starting to come together nicely as a special place, for a special celebration...

Tamlyn and Sami swapped their vows in a quiet little glade of venerable oak trees, in front of a meandering trickle from a nearby spring, surrounded by happily swaying white paper lanterns and a vintage carpet. All of these touches transformed the glen from a cheerful wooded glade into an even happier and joyful place, where Tamlyn and Sami were joined by a group of around thirty of their closest friends and family.

Everything went perfectly - Sami's three sisters supported deftly as the bridesmaids, Matt safely completed the job of witness and ring bearer without dropping anything, the mums recitals of the readings (one from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy!) and Sami's dad's beaming face as he escorted his eldest down the carpet, all producing numerous happy tears around the glade.

Time for congratulations, celebrations, great food, fabulous drink and many hours of merriment!

(thanks to Rich for the first three photos of the wedding ceremony in this section)

The speeches were kept classy, with lots of reminiscing about the past, present and future possibilities. Tamlyn's toast masters training served him well - those looking on probably wouldn't have realised that his speech was based on about six words scribbled on a piece of cardboard a few hours earlier :), and Matt's best man speech received enough laughs to be considered a job well done.

Tamlyn and Sami even surprised everyone after dinner by breaking out a secret-squirrel 1920s Charleston wedding dance. The dance had even been uniquely choreographed just for them and their special day, with much practising in secret, but they performed it superbly to much clapping, smiling, whoots and general delight!

Well, the wedding was over, Tamlyn and Sami were now officially newly weds, with fingers sporting sparkly new rings and full of promise, promises and future plans. We'd made some new friends, great quantities of French food had been savoured and wine had been quaffed, but it was now time to head northwards to Paris, to hang out with our favourite French family; Stef, Vanessa and little Jack.

Let's hope the traffic is better this time...