Alice Newitt

Day 0: PRE-DEPARTURE, in which I make an important decision, my flat starts falling apart, and things almost go very wrong in Madrid airport

Well, technically Day -1, which was the day on which I was sorting out my boarding passes and trying to make the most important decision of the trip, which novels to pack, when I was interrupted by my friendly downstairs neighbour letting me know that my bathroom was leaking into hers. As it was, this was a fair complaint, albeit inconveniently timed. As it the way with nearly all issues these days, I raised a ticket on the portal for my letting agency, and then got back to my important task. In the end, I went with Demon Copperhead, which I was already a third of the way through, and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child. I like to juxtapose when I’m away by reading literature deeply of a place of where I am not. The experience feels richer for it, somehow.

My journey to Peru was split into two connecting flights. The first, to Madrid, was short and sweet, but spiced up the Spanish grandma sitting next to me, who, after hearing me use two words of Spanish, assumed that I was indeed Spanish and began jabbering away. Fortunately (for me) I was spared further embarrassed as she then very quickly became magnificently unwell with some sort of stomach trouble, and when she was quickly hurried off the plane at the end of the flight, it became clear that half the flight was related to this most beloved Spanish matriarch. Poor lady.

At Madrid, the three most patient men alive helped me through the transfer process, and then I waited in a glassy flashy terminal whose emptiness contrasted with the craziness of the Heathrow Terminal 5 that I’d just escaped. At just before midnight I boarded the flight, which rather unnerving was being showed as a different time to the one on my boarding pass, but as we were all getting settled the pilot came on over the speaker to inform us that there was an issue with the plane and we would have to disembark. It now being well into the early hours of the morning, I viewed this as a soft way of announcing that the flight has been cancelled, and back in the terminal there were plenty of people in a tizz about ongoing transfers now likely to be missed. I surprised myself by not having a nervous breakdown, although it might just have been that I didn’t have the energy for one.

I didn’t put much stock in the desk ladies’ reassurances that efforts were being made to repair the plane which now cast in darkness, but then a stroke of luck: someone somewhere announced something in Spanish over a tinny intercom, everyone cheered and hurried to get on the plane, the hubbub drowning out the English translation, and I could only assume that the plane had been repaired.

Later, the pilot would claim that the broken component was not necessary for flight and only had to be repaired because it was required by law. This was not wholly convincing, btu I was so tired by that point I would have preferred to drown in the airport then spend a night in Madrid airport.

A curiosity amongst the audio selection on the plane’s entertainment service was a Dua Lipa podcast in which she interviews Hanya Yanaghara. Is Dua a fellow A Little Life fanatic/sadist? Thinking about it now, I think that I do recall her attending the stage adaptation. Would the podcast has shed more light on this? Almost certainly, but I was for once in my life too tired for any Yanaghara content. I loaded up the Barbie movie and pressed play.

Day 1: THE JOURNEY TO PERU, in which I finally arrive, have several frightening encounters with public highways and make a delightful food discovery

To the rest of the world, a different day. To me, still the same day. Arriving in Lima, I was so pleased to see my pre-booked transfer taxi man standing in the arrivals hall with a board with my name on that I gave him a tip that will probably feed him for a week.

Back in Madrid, I had messaged my tour company to advise them of my flight’s delay, and let them know that if my arrival transfer couldn’t be rearranged, I would make my own way to the hotel. When I had arrived at Lima, however, I had quickly realised that I had overestimated my ability to do this. The arrivals hall was a chaotic mess of all manner of people purporting to be taxi-drivers, and outside it wasn’t much better: I was approached by three different ‘taxi’ drivers in the time I spend waiting for my driver to pay his parking fee.

Once on the roads, things got madder still. As we passed by shanty towns, it quickly began clear that the road markings were only decorative in function, and that driving onto the banks of the highway to overtake someone on the asphalt was acceptable so long as everybody tooted their horns. But then we drove over the hill and drove along the coast, and while it was still terrifying, I could see what might be magical about this place. Still, arriving at my hotel room and flopping onto the bed was one of most wonderful moments of my entire life.

If I’ve learnt anything from previous tours, it’s that if you want to meet up with someone on your tour ahead of the meetup, simply go into the hotel lobby and look around. This year’s specimen, a Canadian called Brad, was quickly located sitting on one of the sofas. After the acceptable quota of small talk, we headed out and wound up in a seafood restaurant, not something I usually do with someone I have just met. After that, I returned to the hotel to discover two things: Keir Starmer was the new prime minister, and I had already burnt my nose. What a day.

In the evening we met up with the group, and each rattled off our names pointlessly as if any of us would remember more than one or two on the first try. The guide then led us on foot very very quickly to a restaurant very very far away, and once again I cheated death in trying to negotiate the Lima traffic, this time from the more vulnerable vantage point of a pedestrian. After dinner, however, the return journey seemed much shorter, so many I had just been starved.

And then, finally, I got into bed, turned off the lights, and thought, wow, I’m in Peru! And then immediately fell fast asleep.