Alarm clocks had been
set for 6 a.m, but I woke up at 5, ready to go. The trip was over,
except for the journey home. We had done most of the packing the night
before, and had agreed to have breakfast at a truck stop on the way to
the airport. I can't recall stopping, other than to take on fuel for
the last time, close to the airport. We were now all rather subdued -
the trip was over.
We arrived at the airport without incident and
having dropped Anne, Alain and all the luggage off at the Departures
drop off point, I took the car to the agreed spot in the car park. It
is amazing how emotionally involved you can get with a lump of metal.
Each time, I quietly say thank you to the car - it is amazing how much
we put these cars through and how little trouble they usually present
us with. This Toyota had been particularly well behaved - thank you.
I found the others in the departure area and,
after checking in our luggage, we went to the souvenir shop to reduce
the rather large amount of Chilean pesos we had left over. I know that
better and cheaper souvenirs can be bought en route - as I had found
in Toconao, but these then have to be dragged around for the remainder
of the trip, when fragile cups and clocks can easily get broken. The
rep from the car rental firm managed to find us - a sign that we must
have stood out in the crowd - and the formalities of returning the car
were soon completed without problem.
Unlike 2003, the flights took off on time. As
usual, I could not resist the temptation of taking yet more pictures
of the flight over the
Andes. Having said our 'au revoirs'
to Alain in Frankfurt, Anne and I arrived eventually, 10 minutes
early, at
London-Heathrow. As always, plans for
the next trip are already in place - north western Argentina in
October 2005. Eventually I tumbled into bed at 9 pm BST - 33 hours
after getting up at Pichidangui.
During our trip we had travelled 21,832 km
(some 13,500 miles) to get from England via Frankfurt and Buenos Aires
to Santiago and then drove as far north as Maria Elena and back again.
In Chile we travelled 5,550 km (c. 3,400 miles) by road - some 2,000
km of which along the often excellent Panamericana. We had only one
puncture. I came back with 5.07 GBytes of extra data (mainly digital
images) on my laptop in my Copiapoathon 2004 folder - now containing
3,670 files. In addition, Alain's folder contains another 2.88 GBytes
with 2,185 files. It was the first time that I relied entirely on
digital cameras and without regrets. Each evening I downloaded that
day's images from Alain and my cameras to the laptop and, after some
little time to flip the portrait format pictures over, we'd open a
bottle of wine and enjoy the daily image show, all before dinner.
As always, the reports are my way of documenting
and reliving some of our adventures before they fade from memory, or
rather blend into one, and to fulfil a promise to Anne and Alain that
I'd tell them in detail where we had been and what we had seen after
the event, rather than in the field, where every one should
concentrate on absorbing as many images and experiences as possible
without having to know what, where and when.
For now, books on north west Argentina are
piling up around me and planning for 2005 begins in earnest.
