It was supposed to be the trip of a life-time when Orléans teacher Amelia Alie left for Peru on March 7 with her boyfriend Alex. The couple had been looking forward to hiking through the Andes and visiting Machu Picchu. But what started out as the trip of a lifetime turned into a nightmare, thanks to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“We were having dinner at a restaurant on the Sunday and we were planning to try to get tickets the next day to come home and our waiter came by and said you need to finish up right now because we’re closing and everything is being shut down. It was insane,” says Alie, who is back in Orléans now and just starting her 14 days of self-isolation which is mandatory for all travelers re-entering the country.

Amelia Alie and her boyfriend Alex sharing a happier moment in Peru before the coronavirus interrupted their vacation. PHOTO SUPPLIED

The pair returned to the hostel they were staying at in Cusco and tried to purchase plane tickets to get back to Canada with no success. The next morning, they decided they might have better luck at the airport, but it had already been placed on lockdown as was the hostel they were staying in.

To add insult to injury, it was the same day they were supposed to visit the legendary Machu Pichu, but it wasn’t to be.

Since they could no longer stay at the hostel, they decided to move into a guesthouse with a colleague who was already visiting from Canada. The trio ended up sharing a room together for the next four days while trying to find a way out of Peru.

“We began seeking out numbers and e-mails immediately,” says Alie. “At the beginning, it was very frustrating because we weren’t getting any response from the Canadian government at all. We were instructed that we would have to just wait out the two-week quarantine.

“I don’t think anyone really understood the gravity of the situation in Peru. They completely shut down the entire country. You were not able to move from place to place at all. There were no buses running. There were no internal flights. There were no options for us.”

When the lockdown started in Peru there were more than 4,000 Canadians in the country, Over 3,600 expressed a desire to come back to Canada. Of that number, only 1,400 had been extricated as of Sunday, March 29.

On the afternoon of Thursday, March 26, the trio received an e-mail from the Canadian government that a chartered plane was being sent to bring Canadians from Lima to Toronto. Tickets for the charter were made available at 3:30 p.m. and they were sold out within three minutes. Through a stroke of good fortune, the trio managed to secure three of the tickets, but they still needed to get from Cusco to Lima.

“Even that process was insane. They didn’t send us any confirmation, so we weren’t sure whether there would be a flight to Lima. So the next morning, we went to the airport at 5:30 a.m., where we had to wait outside the airport with about 300 other Canadians who were in Cusco for several hours before getting on one of two planes that were sent. Looking back, it was kind of like being in a movie,” says Alie.

The trio eventually got to Lima and made it on one of the flights to Toronto where they had to rent a car to drive back to Ottawa. All told the emergency exit from Peru cost them about $2,000 each. Money well spent to be able to spend the next two weeks in self isolation in their own homes and in their own beds.

“I’m so grateful to be back in Canada,” says a relieved Alie.

(This story was made possible thanks to the generous support of our local business partners.)