12 March, Mexico City International Airport – 7:56am

For my last day in South America, I spent the day being a bit of a tourist. Myself and Kieran, a London accountant who's also left everything to go travel the world, took a taxi ride to the historic centre of Lima, watched the changing of the guard i the main square, had a wander about the huge old Spanish style district, had an amazingly cheap but delicious chinese/peruvian lunch (P$8.50/€2.20) of soup followed by a pork and rice dish. Then went to MALI, the main Peruvian art museum to see a rather empty and quite small but beautiful gallery of modern to Inca exhibits.

I had plans to go shoot a punk gig, right before leaving Lima, but decide it's better not to rush to the airport, and spend my last few hours hanging out at the hostel, playing cards and having a bear and chatting some of the new arrivals there about what Cusco is like and the terrifying dangers of altitude sickness.

mexico city aiport - via camera phone

Checking into Lima's international aiport is much like any other, lots of queuing and overpriced food. The 6 hor flight flys by, as it takes off at 1:30am, so 90% of it is spent fast asleep. Arriving into Mexico city for my stopover, I'm met at the start of immigration by a big Mexican with a piece of paper in his hand, I get brought past the long queues and into a 'special' room where I start getting questioned, in a friendly enough way, about where I'm coming from, where my parents are from, what I'm doing in the USA, do I have friends there and after a couple of minutes of this I see his piece of paper says my nationality is the Islamic State of Iran. I point this out to him and he goes off with all my documents and papers and returns 10 minutes later to let me through no problem. Hopefully the same doesn't happen on the American border side. A bit of postcard writing, some overpriced breakfast snacks and it's now onto the United States of America...