December 16th – 18th, 2016

Days 262 – 264: Bangkok to Santiago

Getting from southeast Asia to Chile is a BITCH. We could not find a single nonstop flight from Bangkok to Santiago. Our final itinerary was a whopping 4-city marathon: Bangkok to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to NYC, NYC to Lima, and finally Lima to Santiago. We left at 8:30AM local time and arrived at 1:30PM local time the next day – all told, it was 40 hours from first take-off to final landing, crossing 11 time zones! The Premier Pass gained us access to two airport lounges, unfortunately, both were at the very beginning of the journey, so we weren’t that tired yet. Sadly, we were in the wrong terminal in JFK and we weren’t allowed off the plane in Lima, so we were absolutely exhausted when we finally arrived in Santiago.

 

Getting ready for the longest flight of our lives. Lindsay is going to need A LOT of coffee

 

The first of many breakfasts in the Bangkok Executive Lounge

 

Lunch in the Executive Lounge in Hong Kong

 

Igor’s parents come all the way out to the airport just to see us for 15min as we change terminals in JFK – I think they missed him…

 

Descending into Santiago at last!

 

Our “hotel” in Santiago – even though we found it on Booking.com, it felt like an AirBnB apartment rental – but at USD $50/night in the city center, the place was a steal!

Despite the jetlag, we had dinner plans for the evening. After working with Concha y Toro for the past 5 years, Lindsay had quite a few former colleauges in Santiago – so we took full advantage of Chilean hospitality to get our fill of fine wine, delicious seafood, and catch up on a year’s worth of office gossip! While we expected to be jetlagged, we had enough energy to destroy 4 bottles of Italo’s wine stash and didn’t notice how late it was getting until 1AM – since we hadn’t adjusted to the 11-hour timezone differece, and the change in hemispheres meant sunset was deceptively late, we completely lost track of the time! Luckily for all three of us, it was a Saturday so we could all recover the lost sleep the next day.

Seriously…we literally did nothing but sleep the next day. No pictures.

 

View of Santiago from Italo’s balcony

 

Italo treats us to fresh oysters and several bottles of *exquisite* Chilean chardonnay

 

Enjoying a fantastic evening with Chile’s best wine ambassador