Day 289: Travelling from Buenos Aires back to Puerto Montt
So, Seabourn had to call the Argentinean police to drag us out of our stateroom when we refused to disembark in Buenos Aires. We tried to claim squatter’s rights, but Lindsay didn’t know how to translate that into Spanish.
Nah! Just kidding! (But no, seriously, we’ve been looking all over the ship to see if there was a place to hide…just until they reached Antarctica again…) We were out of our room before the 8AM cut-off, gorging ourselves on our FINAL cruise buffet – we had no intention of paying for any food today, so we ate all the pancakes, eggs, yogurt, fresh fruit and donuts we could shove in our mouths to last us until the airport lounge. We dragged our feet until 10AM when we really didn’t have a good reason to stay on the ship anymore…goodbye, Quest. We will miss you.
Lindsay tries to hide under the covers so she doesn’t have to leave her cocoon of luxury, but she doubts the tip or stack of orange chocolates we leave for our cabin steward will prevent her from telling the captain about two stowaways
On our own again in Argentina. Party-time is over: we skip the USD$60 taxi and catch a USD$10pp bus to the airport.
We had a LONG travel day ahead of us today: a late, 6PM flight to Santiago getting us in around 9PM for a 2hour layover (during which we have to pass through Chilean immigration & customs) before our 11PM flight to Puerto Montt, which would land around 1AM the next day. Even though we have the afternoon free, we decide to head straight to the airport as we have nowhere to store our bags before our flight. Besides, we will be passing through Buenos Aires again in a few weeks, so we still had time to do our sightseeing of the city.
When we arrived at EZE at noon, we were in for a big disappointment: the ticket agent wouldn’t let us check-in to our flight yet, despite the fact that the airport has zero waiting-room seats, and hundreds of cranky Argentineans standing in a myriad of lines all over the place. Oh, and no wi-fi either. Seriously – this airport sucks.
The attendant claimed our flight actually didn’t leave until 7PM, and the official check-in time would start at 3PM. At first we were a tad worried the bus took us to the wrong airport as the flight time didn’t match our reservation, but she confirmed the flight number and said the airline changed the departure time. Even so, we had lounge passes inside the terminal and we want to get inside! PLEASE DON’T MAKE US WAIT OUTSIDE. After a little pleading and puppy-dog eyes she agreed to let us check-in at 1:30PM instead, giving us only 1½ hours to sit and stare into space.
In the meantime, we double-checked our flight reservation email and the Google flight status – both still said our flight would leave at 6PM. Hmmm. And even though a *second* ticket agent assured us that our flight was supposed to leave at 7PM, we were suspicious, as our ticket clearly had a 5:15PM boarding time printed. Sure enough, our flight time had NOT changed – good thing we TRIPLE checked, otherwise we would have missed yet another international flight!
Waiting in the ticketing hall at EZE for 90 long, boring minutes before we are allowed to check-in for our *6PM* flight
Once we get through security and immigration, we rush to the executive lounge and camp out for a good 3 hours and gorge ourselves on free food, wine, and (best of all) INTERNET! We have been disconnected for over three weeks and we had a backlog of blog entries to upload and emails to catch up on. The time flew by and we barely got through half of our to-do list before our first flight of the day. We got another hour to work once we reached the lounge in the Santiago airport as well.
Food, wine and Wi-fi – Argentina is starting to redeem itself
Boozed up and ready to fly! Once we cross the Andes we are back in CHILE!
We finally got to Puerto Montt in the middle of the night. We found a shared shuttle van and booked seats for a cheap USD$15. It seemed like a great idea at first – our flight was the only one coming in at this hour, how many fellow passengers would we have? Unfortunately for us, the van filled up completely, and the first couple to get dropped off had booked some shady AirB&B lodge outside of the city. Neither they nor the driver knew exactly where it was, so we were driving aimlessly through a dark, sketchy residential area, looking for a house that was NOT marked as a hotel. We finally stop at the ONE house that still had lights on in the middle of the night (hey! Maybe that could have been a clue!), but there was some confusion about the couple’s reservation. They took all their bags out of the shuttle, only to put them back in – we started to drive away when the manager came running after us saying he had their reservation after all! WOULD YOU GUYS GET OUT OF THE FUCKING CAR ALREADY? It’s 2AM, there is *clearly* no other hotel on this block – that’s it!
Sorry for the F-bomb, guys, we get a bit cranky when we’re tired. We finally fell into bed around 2:30AM – any lingering feelings of comfort from the pampering we got on our cruise were looooong gone. Back to the real world, bitches.