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.