Some of my friends seem to think I’m a pretty intrepid traveller, given the way I keep taking myself off to interesting places for holidays. In fact, it’s hard work travelling long-haul by myself, especially to somewhere where I don’t speak the language. There’s nobody to keep an eye on my bags while I nip to the loo, nobody to share the excitement with, and perhaps worst of all, nobody to have dinner with – I do hate eating in restaurants on my own. I miss Christopher dreadfully when I’m travelling, but I don’t intend to give up holidays just because my domestic circumstances have changed.
I may be moderately well-travelled, but I’m not prepared to travel outside Europe completely by myself. I feel much more confident if I know that I’ve got a back-up team doing all the hard work with the logistics and generally looking out for me. Which is why I decided to put myself in the hands of a company with a decent reputation, and ask them to make all the arrangements. Yes, it cost more to have a fully tailor-made holiday, with a guide, driver and car entirely at my disposal for the week. But it was immensely reassuring, and meant that I needn’t worry at all about getting to the sites, finding clean restaurants for lunch, or dealing with public transport in a totally unfamiliar language. (I don’t speak any Spanish at all. At school we had the choice of Spanish or German. All my close friends chose German, and a group of girls I considered to be right bitches chose Spanish. So it was an easy choice. Thirty years later, Spanish would be considerably more use to me!)
I was met at Arrivals at Lima airport, and subsequently at Chiclayo airport, by a uniformed rep holding a card with my name on it, and whisked off to my hotel by an English-speaking driver who made sure I checked in with no problems. On my first day in Lima I was also given a “Traveller’s Assistance” card. This was an unexpected bonus. It provided a 24/7 emergency backup telephone number, offering up to two free visits from a doctor or to a hospital, medical transfers back to Lima in case of necessity, some limited cover for medical expenses if hospitalised and for prescriptions, and help tracing lost luggage. Obviously, it’s not a substitute for fully comprehensive travel insurance, and I fortunately didn’t need it – but it was good to know that if I’d had a minor injury such a twisted ankle falling down from a temple, help would have been at hand without having to call on the big guns of my travel insurance. That was very reassuring.
I had two guides, one in Lima and the other in Chiclayo & Trujillo. They were both good – very knowledgeable and informative, pleasant, and with excellent English. They too wore a uniform, and had done three years of training to become a licensed guide, so they really knew their stuff. In all I think I had five drivers over the week, so I didn’t get to know them as well as I did the two guides. But I felt very safe with all of them – which was no mean achievement considering the generally appalling standard of driving I witnessed on the roads every day!
So although I was indeed travelling by myself and not as part of a group, I had a whole back-up team whose job it was to look after me, do all the hard work with the arrangements and transport, and generally make sure the holiday ran smoothly. All I had to do was set my alarm to the right time to make sure I got up and was ready at the agreed pick-up time each morning. It worked very well, and I would have no hesitation in making similar arrangements again.
