Days 227 to 235 – Thursday 4th to Friday 12th May 2005

I had planned on staying in Lima over the weekend, so not having been able to collect my Passport wasn’t so much of an issue, more of an inconvenience. The other thing I needed to collect whilst I was in Lima were my ATM cards. They had been Fed-Ex’ed to me in Lima (Cheers Mum and Dad) and arrived within three days of benig sent. They went from London to New York to Atlanta to Florida to Caracas to Lima in the space of Friday to Tuesday.

I needed to collect them but they were over the other side of the city so Fed-Ex got a motorbike courier and delivered them to my hostel. Didn’t even need to move. Efficiency at its best.

On the other hand, the British Embassy were the antithesis of efficiency. I got one excuse after another as to why my Passport (which I had paid about £120 for – not as if they were doing me a favour amd giving me the Passport) wasn’t ready.

1. We only got your forms two days ago from the British Consulate in Cusco – I had left them there 11 days previous.

5. If you really need a Passport we can issue you an emergency, but you can only return to England on that.

All this was taking its toll. I was pretty much expecting it to be a struggle but after the fourth time I went there or called them I began to get pretty pissed off.

I passed the weekend away with Aaron and Jon getting drunk, reading, watching DVD’s and generally lazing around, so it wasn’t like it was a hardship, but it was just annoying that I couldn’t go anywhere – I had to wait until these people decided that they would actually fix this problem instead of giving me excuses.

When Aaron and Jon left on Monday evening to head north I was still waiting for my Passport. It turned out I needed to wait until Thursday afternoon when I would finally collect it.

Friday I decided I had enough of Peru, it wasn’t doing me any favours and I wanted to get north to Colombia. So I boarded a bus for 20 hours to Mancora, a beach town right at the northern end of Peru.