We are back in Port Elizabeth and another tour has ended in a way that we hadn't planned, although the risk of this happening was always there.  About the only thing we had still wanted to do in Mexico was to visit a cenote so we hadn't missed out on too much by leaving four weeks early.  We would have had a week or two that we would have had to fill if we hadn't although I'm sure we would have filled it easily.  The main reason for leaving early was to avoid the uncertainty that we found oppressive when we were stuck in Argentina when COVID first struck. 

When we had initially booked our flights to Mexico we had not checked Lufthansa's baggage policy assuming that all non-American airlines happily accept sports goods, including bicycles, with not extra charges.  We weren't billed for the bicycles when coming to Mexico because our first sector was with a South African regional airline that doesn't charge but we were hit with an extra charge of more than seven thousand pesos per bicycles when checking in at Cancun International!  To add insult to injury the immegration authorities forced us to pay the six hundred peso per person entry fee again because I didn't have a receipt of the first payment.  They wouldn't accept the entry on my credit card statement, even though the dates and amounts matched and the reference on the statement was the Mexican Immegration authority.  I sensed that they are encouraged to shake down tourists if given the chance.

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The first sector from Cancun to Frankfurt happened to be with Lufthansa's low cost subsidiary.  Almost nothing was provided that didn't have to be paid for.  They even kept the temperature in the cabin as low as possible to encourage passengers to buy a blanket.  The entertainment system was free but you had to buy earphones to use it.  And of course there was no way I was going to pay an arm and a leg for a beer or a glass of wine after being put over the barrel just to get ourselves and the bicycles on the aeroplane.

Frankfurt was covered in a blanket of light snow when we landed and it was a chilly one degree outside.  Being a low cost airline we had to take a bus from the apron to the terminal and the almost freezing temperature was very obvious having come from balmy Cancun.  Ten hours in Terminal One at Frankfurt Airport passed as slowly as ten hours in an airport does.  At least the wifi worked well and the seats we found were comfortable.  The airport was quite empty with only five flights after six in the evening with our flight being the second last at ten o'clock that night.

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The plane from Frankfurt to Johannesburg was practically empty.  We had a whole row of seats each to ourselves so we could stretch out and sleep well.  It was one of the best sleeps I have had on a long haul flight beaten only by the rescue flight back to South Africa from Sao Paulo when all the lock downs started.

Then we had another long lay over at OR Tambo International outside Johannesburg while we waited for our flight to Port Elizabeth.  The check-in staff at the low cost regional airline we were on were absolutely wonderful.  It seems that the baggage handlers in Frankfurt had left one of the bicycle boxes lying on its side in the snow and the cardboard had changed to tissue paper - how it survived the flight to Johannesburg I don't know.  We got it wrapped in plastic at OR Tambo and the SA Airlink check-in staff went out of their way to make sure it was looked after.

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Back in PE, we checked in to the airport hotel and will start getting our lives organized tomorrow.  Hopefully we can get a few tours done in South Africa while we wait for Omicron to subside.