Hello,

I will be blogging about my gap year abroad when I was sixteen and spent a year abroad in South America, I hope people will find them interesting.

Please let me know what you think and thank you for reading,

owj44

My Peruvian Adventure (P.1)

Leaving home alone

If I thought getting on a plane was a big step to take in conquering my fears it soon became clear to me that stepping off it into a completely different culture and foreign land was something that I had not properly considered before boarding the aircraft from Heathrow to Lima in the first place.

The day before I left I decided to cook a bacon sandwich in my parents’ kitchen. Spending several days in Miami children’s hospital is something I certainly hadn’t expected to be doing half way on my travels. Having an Aga is great when it works as it was intended, but when it doesn’t and has trouble producing enough heat to cook the simplest of dishes it’s another story… food poisoning they later told me in hospital.

I was sixteen; fresh faced and just finished my GCSE’s. The idea of going abroad for a year to learn a foreign language and a new culture was one of the most unconventional things I had ever heard of, so naturally I was interested. I had never been one to conform to the normalities of life at school. I spent several years studying Spanish at school but had yet to master the basics. So when I arrived at Lima airport, welcomed by a host of unfriendly Peruvian taxi drivers harassing me for what I suspected was my custom, it wasn’t exactly reassuring or comforting. I landed in the late hours into the airport in Lima; the lights of the city looked exactly like those in England, which eased my anxieties of the year ahead until I returned to England. I was planning on taking every day as it came, a strategy that I had already adopted in my former life in England. I silently wondered how different it could be from what I called home. From the air it appeared that this foreign land I was about to spend the next twelve months in at least had some of the western comforts I was used to, such as electricity and it wasn’t the desolate landscape I had created in my over active imagination during the flight from Miami to Lima. I had no knowledge of Peru before I left, I simply knew I needed a change from my current life and seized the first opportunity that came my way.  A radical but necessary action and opportunity I thought impossible not to act upon. It was an adventure to me like the ones I had read about in books when I was younger and I too wanted to explore, as well as getting to know the real me and having that sense of freedom I yearned for just like all those characters in my books.  

In hindsight I suppose there were several reasons I decided I had to do something considered so unorthodox, the most compelling reason for my swift departure from my comfortable and tranquil life was the poor relationship with my family. The reaction I generally received from the majority of people who knew I had decided to go was that I was being silly. Why not do my Alevels and then go? Looking back on my situation then I had every advantage in life and I could see why some people thought I was throwing it all away. I was from a middle class family with the comforts that were accompanied by that life style. Why would I give it up to go and live in a third world country for a year? In truth, I felt I needed an escape, to prove to myself as well as my family that I wasn’t incapable of taking the initiative and equally capable of using my intuition to get through life.