Last Legs

Finally, we're in South America, the last leg of our trip. Our next and final stop will be home.

I'll be honest, there were times when it felt like we'd never make it this far. I still remember lying in bed on our first night in Mumbai, and a small panic creeping into my chest as it suddenly dawned on me that we were going to be away for one whole year. I mean, I'd known that all along of course, but it wasn't until we were there at the very beginning of it with no solid plans that it suddenly seemed to stretch out ahead to what felt like an eternity. One whole year. 365 days. And we were at the start of day one.

Already we'd been hassled by a hoard of taxi drivers when we emerged from the airport, demanding that we tell them our destination and shouting out prices in a currency that we hadn't yet got to grips with. No one seemed to recognise the name of our hotel, and as we drove through Mumbai in the middle of the night it looked like an eerie, abandoned construction zone. Everywhere we looked they seemed to be in the process of building a new flyover. We saw more cranes than people. When we finally reached our hotel, it took them a good 10 minutes to find our booking, with a bunch of young Indian guys glancing over, muttering and laughing in the corner the whole while. We'd only been in the country two hours. “One whole year of this?” I thought later, “I really don't know if I can do it”.

As is often the case, everything looked brighter in the morning, and it didn't take long for us to start enjoying our trip. Since then, though, we've occasionally gone through phases of wanting to go home. Travelling is amazing, but incredibly tiring. The things you take for granted at home – a place to sleep, finding your way around town, knowing where and what to eat, finding a usable loo, general communication – all of it becomes a daily challenge while you're travelling. Most of the time it's easy enough to deal with, especially when the rewards of travelling vastly outstrip the difficulties. But sometimes it all just gets to you, you know?

Anyway, for that reason, sometimes it felt like South America was a distant plan that we were never getting any closer to reaching. And now, nine months after we set off, we're suddenly here, feeling like we're on our last legs and totally unprepared.

You see, we'd been spoilt in Australia and New Zealand by the familiarity that came with being in a Western, English-speaking country. For a couple of months we went back to being able to communicate easily, cook the same meals that we'd eat at home, browse bookshops and go for a nice coffee, book buses and hostels online, buy good bread, cheese and wine. And we got to spend time in two nice home environment during our work exchanges. Now we were going back to a non-English-speaking country, where we wouldn't know how anything worked or be able to ask for help as easily. Unlike a lot of South East Asia, this is a part of the world where people generally assume that you are able to speak their language seeing as you've decided to travel there. Unfortunately, we can't.

It was all so daunting, and we were just SO jetlagged that we spent our first two days sleeping and reading in our hostel.

Let me tell you, time travel is not all it's made out to be. We took off from Auckland airport at 4:40pm on Thursday 28th October. We landed in Santiago at midday that same day. We'd crossed the International Date Line. I can't get my head around it on a good day, and after a 10 hour flight I couldn't get my body to accept it either, especially when the time difference between New Zealand and Chile is a ridiculous 16 hours. We spent most days trying not to fall asleep, and most nights lying wide awake wishing for sleep.

Once we were semi-recovered and had gotten over a new “Oh fuck it, can't we just go home?” phase, we decided to take action. We signed ourselves up for a five-day Spanish course at our hostel. Our tutor was called Jesus. We were hoping he was the sort of Jesus who could work miracles.