This Is The End...

As the final blog of my Big Adventure I write this after an evening out with Daniela, the lovely Porteña I met in Mendoza during the first month of my trip. We spent the evening conversing mostly in English, with bits of Spanish thrown in: her efforts to communicate in a second language much better than mine, despite my five months of trying.

Tomorrow morning I must catch a cab to Pistarini airport by 10am to be in plenty of time for my 12.30 BA flight back to Heathrow.

All things considered, I´m feeling a bit peculiar.

Now that it´s so close I can´t deny that I´m really quite excited about being back in England and seeing my wonderful sister, my lovely parents and my fantastic friends who I now realise that I have actually missed rather a lot. I´m looking forward to not having to rummage for the same pair of trousers at the bottom of my backpack again or having to haul said backpack around while I wait for yet another 18-hour bus or trudge around trying to find a place to stay. I´m looking forward to a decent cup of tea, being able to communicate properly with people in shops and being able to use a hair dryer. I´m looking forward to my birthday and to enjoying a large glass of chilled Chablis in the garden in Somerset and, of course, to meeting the two new members of my family who have arrived in this world while I´ve been off exploring the other side of it.

But there is a rather large part of me that simply refuses to believe that the Big Adventure is finally over. Five whole months, which always seems like such a long time until you are at the end of it, which I know I´ll never forget and I´m fairly certain that at some point I will try to recapture.

The verdict about whether I am a completely different person will have to wait a while until I have settled back in to Blighty. I don´t feel that different from the girl who stepped off at the very same airport in February, mostly just incredibly fortunate to be one of the few people in the world who has had the opportunity to be so self-indulgent as to actually go travelling. There really aren´t that many of us, however it may seem when you´re enjoying a pint at the Hostel Inn and I hope I always remember that.