After not one, but two, frantic rushes to the airport with plastic bags trailing everywhere, bag bursting due to not being packed correctly and generally massive uselessness for my Christchurch - Austin and Austin - Miami legs, I resolved that this leg of the RTW trip would be different. I spent two hours laying out clothes, rolling and basically creating the best packed pack of my life. Sadly, my addiction to cosmetics and inability to live without socks, bras and underwear mean my pack is still too full for my liking, so I think before I move on from Chile, my friend Katie might be receiving a few presents. Half full pack or bust!
Due to the extreme earliness of my arrival at MIA - brought about because I needed to shuttle from Fort Lauderdale Airport and didn't want to give myself any chance to screw myself over with traffic delays/lost drivers/any of the other random stuff that regularly happens to me - I now have four hours to kill. I'm trying to save my big American notes for Chile, just in case I have an emergency, so don't want to spend any money although in the interests of sanity, shelled out a ridiculous $8 for one hour's worth of internet. After this, I intend to go sit at my gate and read as much of Guns, Germs and Steel as possible, as I'm starting to realise carrying 2 books in addition to the rest of my crap is not a long term solution.
My last night in America was spent at a dreary, slightly creepy hotel airport. Despite being determined to give myself one night's good sleep after three and a half weeks of partying til 6am and crashing on couches/broken beds, I got sucked into the QUALITY programming of TLC and stayed up til 3am watching Extreme Couponing and My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. Cultural and social animal - that's me.
I'm very super excited about the next 3 months and everything that I'll get to do. I know most people are very confused about my plans in South America so let me lay out my (very rough) plans.
Arrive in Chile, where one of my closest friends from Texas, Katie Casstevens has been living for the last year, teaching English/working for iKwest, a social media app/running a student travel company called Pathway Chile/organising pub crawls for the Santiago Pub Crawl/somehow managing to still sleep and eat amongst all this. I'll be living with her and her homestay mother, Yuri and will take one week of Spanish classes at a local language school. I'm under no illusions that this will make me in anyway fluent, but its better than nothing and all my good intentions to take Spanish classes before leaving for this trip were put to bed by the earthquake that damaged my entire city in February, so there we go. My best friend from high school, Helen, and her uni flatmate Bea are currently in Argentina and will travel to Chile around the same time.
From Chile onwards, I will travel with Helen and Bea to Bolivia for a couple of weeks, and even though it's totally stereotypical and everyone does it, I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT THE UYUNI SALT FLATS.
After Bolivia, I'll make my way back to Santiago, where with Katie and her sister Amy who is visting from Texas, will go for a 3 night trip to EASTER FREAKING ISLAND. I'll finish up my time in Chile with a trip to San Pedro de Atacama with Katie's company Pathway and then make my way to Colombia, and meet up with Bea and Helen again for a month or so in Colombia, which I am also super excited about, before making my way to Europe (and if you think South America is unplanned, don't even ask about the European portion of my trip)
All in all, its going to be a pretty epic 3 months.
