Monday 12 January 2009

Journey Home

The journey from Pto Montt to Santiago was fairly uneventful, as some would say "Another bus journey". Hey I only caught the bus twice in four weeks!
Xmas and New Year passed by and my neatly trimmed stomach was disappearing again. I had one last chance to recover....
I arrived at Heathrow at around 6pm. I'd tried to work out how to get home and almost wished Iberia's baggage handling incompetance would allow me to catch the train home [no bike & trailer!] Sadly this was not to be the case on this occasion.
So I had little choice but to rebuild my bike and head out into the cold damp night. I headed onto the A4, A3044, A308, A320 and finally the A3 south. Jesus was it cold. I passed some dude cycling on his way to Woking, he asked where I was heading. "Portsmouth" I replied. He nearly hit the hedge!
I made Guildford and discovered that the petrol stations are expensive places to buy mars bars and bottles of coke. Still I needed food as all I'd had was a small breakfast earlier in the day and stauntly refused to pay 5Euro for a bottle of pop in Madrid!
I pushed on as I was making 10mph and could make Portsmouth before 2am. Sadly I met the worst drivers I'd met on my whole journey here. Black Audis, Saab drivers and the odd Porsche. All sadly total knobs. Santiago in rush hour was nothing compared to the shear magnitude of bad driving I found here. I recalled practically every other car either waving, shouting congratulations (I think that was what they were shouting!), and piping their horn in a fiendly fashion in South America. Here, in my own country, I was ashamed to discover how unpleasant everyone was. Maybe it was the winter's freezing fog, poor economic outlook and incompetent Government that was at the heart of Britain's unfriendliness?

I was just over Butser Hill when I came out of the freezing fog and could now see fields white and crisp with ice. The moon shone down and I could see the fog rolling off the downs. Orion was now standing upright, beautifull, but sadly taking a night photo in the middle of the A3 in the dead of night would have to be done some other day.

I made it back just after 2am. Susy had arrived earlier in the day and had warmed up the bed.

Ahhhh, it's nice to be home.

for my next trip I may try this .... next holiday