August 3rd – Departure and Arrival

To understand the background to the ‘day’ posts read the pages under ‘About’.

Getting up early (5:30) on August 3rd, I took a taxi to Heathrow Airport (I didn’t live far away then). I met my colleague Uisdean at the airport, and at 12:05 took off on a BA (British Airways) flight for Peru (probably on a Boeing 707), see Heathrow photo. This was my first long-distance flight (I’d flown before on domestic flights only)

The plane landed in Antigua at 15:00 local time. Passengers were allowed off the plane to wander about in the airfield. It was my first experience of tropical heat and humidity, experienced as a wall of humidity just as I went out of the door of the plane, which was something of a shock! The hot humid air hit me like a blanket as I walked down the exit ladder.  Here is a photo of Antigua Airport taken at the time advertising Carnival 1976 (on left) and a picture of an old plane (DC3) for plane spotters.

Leaving Antigua around 15:45, the plane next landed at Caracas, Venezuela where we waited for around 3/4 of an hour. We finally arrived at Lima Airport at 19:45, local time. We were held up in customs, partly because of our custom form entry ‘for work’ (we were being honest, but we should have had other documents as well), and also my fishing rod (packed in a long plastic tube) had disappeared in transit. We didn’t emerge to meet our contacts (Eric Bosc, from Signal Peru & Lori Sneddon, consultant) until 22:00 who by that time were starting to worry somewhat (remember, no mobile phones).

We left the airport in a car and were driven to the four-star Lima Sheraton hotel in the centre of Lima, finally getting into bed at 12:45 having been up for over 25 hours. We just managed to unpack enough to get a shower and then fell into bed.