Mexico City & Back Home (24th + 25th March 2022)

The truly last day of the journey has arrived with today's Thursday, March 24th, 2022. It's amazing what we have experienced and enjoyed in the past two months. Like everything in life, this adventure also comes to an end, so we started the day very leisurely. Packing for one last time, the hand movements are smooth after so many stops. We counted, in total we packed and unpacked our backpacks 28 times.

After a long breakfast, we had about 5 hours until we had to leave for the airport at around 3:30 pm. Time to get a few impressions of Mexico City, so we decided to take a walk in the nearby park “Boscque de Chapultepec”. This is the largest park in Mexico City Center, covering almost 4 square kilometers. In addition to a spacious lake and lots of greenery, there is also a zoo, the Chapultepec Castle, and the Museum of Anthropology.

After having some time and the admission fee being manageable at around 4 €, we decided to stroll around the Museum of Anthropology. The museum, housed in very modern buildings with great architecture, houses numerous treasures from all periods of Mexican history, from times long before the birth of Christ to the Mayan era and into modern times. If you have time (or it's raining) and are interested in history, you should definitely visit these collections.

Just before 4:00 pm, our taxi finally arrived and we got stuck in the already congested traffic of the capital city. Being a taxi driver is extremely thankless here in the big city, just like in Lima, and requires a lot of patience. After almost an hour, we reached the airport (which is actually only 14 km away) and rushed into the hustle and bustle one last time. Much to our delight, everything went very smoothly and quickly, so there was still plenty of time to find a good tequila in the duty-free shops after checking in our luggage.

With a delay of about 30 minutes, we finally took off with our Air France plane towards Paris at around 8:30 pm. Fortunately, the conditions were favorable and it took "only" about 11 hours to reach the French capital. The onward flight to Vienna was scheduled for 3:00 pm local time, which initially seemed easy when landing at 1:15 pm, but turned out to be increasingly tight during the "arrival" process. In addition to another security check of hand luggage, the painfully slow passport control was a huge time waster. So for three planes, there were only two counters open and the automatically created gates for EU citizens were out of service due to Corona (apparently affecting machines too ;-)).

The last adrenaline rush on this journey, in the end, we managed to make it to the plane to Vienna in time (others missed their flight in the line next to us). The last two hours of the flight on this trip passed quickly and when we arrived at Vienna Schwechat just before 5:00 pm local time, we felt a great sense of relief to have survived all the flying. We practically overran the "controls" of Covid vaccination certificates by some recruits of the Austrian Armed Forces (although the guys didn’t really take it seriously either) and after retrieving our luggage, we were joyfully welcomed by (in-laws) Karli & Uschi, who kindly picked us up.

The last part of the journey home on the West Autobahn to Freistadt City was also the first part of the beginning processing and reflection of this wonderful travel experience. Shortly after 8:00 pm, we entered the door of our apartment with all our belongings, closing the final chapter of this adventure. We are grateful and humble to be able to take away many impressions and stories from the past eight weeks. A lot has happened in the past few weeks and some things are put into perspective in view of the fates surrounding Ukraine, which we see in the news every day. Nevertheless, we take a lot of confidence and energy with us for the next weeks and months and will certainly be able to draw on it for a long time.

At this point, we would like to thank all the companions and readers of this blog once again. It was always our intention to create a personal memory for ourselves and to give people who are important to us a little insight into our (travel) everyday life. We hope we were able to do that to some extent. In that sense, Pura Vida & hasta luego!

Your Blackpackers

Kathi & Hannes