Well we are finally in Ecuador. But I think we have experienced some resistance from a higher being!! Or was it some of our families sending some vibes to try and get us to stay. Or maybe the Taxation Office.
Firstly we were doing very last minute packing on Thursday and we slept on borrowed foam mattresses from John's Mum so that we could get an early start to finish packing on the last day. The plane was scheduled to leave at 4PM Friday (19th Sept), but we still had quite a lot of last minute tidying up. John thought that he would wake up at 4am like he normally does and finish off accounts and filing. We mostly only had that to tidy-up and finish cleaning the apartment. But John slept in until 6am. That put him behind by a couple of critical hours.
In order to still be able to use the trailer to finish transporting goods like the refrigerator, washing machine, etc to the storage unit, we had swapped our rental car with John's son Brett. The rental car did not have a tow hitch. But Brett had also been under large pressure and had worked all night getting ready for a major off-shore project (sub-sea gas). He was not around to swap the cars back, as arranged. So John drove to Brett's work to get the rental car. That exercise took another hour.
In rush, John had left his son's house keys in the door when he shifted our goods into his son's home for safe-keeping. His house-mate had found the keys in the door and locked them away in the house (thinking that they were a spare set). The house mate had his phone turned off while he was at an appointment, so was not even contactable. That took another 30 minutes or so of John's time.
While all this was happening and in-between other tasks, John had also taken me to the shopping centre to do some last minute jobs (international drivers' licenses, etc). He also had to do one last delivery trip to the storage unit in the rental car. However, when I called him to come and collect me, he was in the middle of sorting out his son's problems. So I waited 30 minutes to get a taxi.
By this time, we could see that we were running out of time. It was good timing that my son came to see me one last time as we needed his Ute/pickup to carry some of our suitcases to the airport. While we were loading them, John had to do one last trip to his mother and to say goodbye. In hindsight I should have immediately gone to the airport with all the suitcases and met John there.
When we finally got to the airport and by the time I went to the check in counter, I was three minutes late and told the flight had closed for boarding.
After already feeling emotional from saying a teary goodbye to my son I was told that next available flight was at midnight, eight hours later. We couldn't even check-in for another three hours. So we sat with our overloaded trolleys and waited. The only flight available was via Brisbane then onto Sydney which meant we would arrive in Sydney at 9 AM the next day, about 11 hours later than our booking.
We arrived in Brisbane at 7 AM and ran to catch the connecting flight to Sydney. It was so quick I said to John that there would be no way they could transfer our luggage onto the Sydney flight. Well we were not surprised to find it was not on the flight when we arrived in Sydney. I went to baggage collections to check while John checked in to get a hire car. While he was walking back to find me, he noticed our luggage coming in on a conveyor belt. Obviously from the next flight.
This was not how I had imagined us leaving. I thought we would be well slept and refreshed and ready for our long flight to Santiago. Anyway we checked into the Hotel and were given our keys to the room. When I opened the door to our room I immediately noticed that there were towels on the bathroom floor and then a pair of feet hanging out the end of the bed. Ooops sorry. So we went downstairs and told them that someone was asleep in our room. It was quite funny really because we had booked and paid for the previous night. Reception had told us on the phone (as I had rung them from Perth to say we were late) that we were already checked in. But as they could see we were standing right in front of them. The people at reception were very polite and upgraded us to another room and also had a little chuckle about the whole thing. After our showers we fell into bed for a couple of hours sleep.
Our reason for travelling via Sydney was to spend a day at the Sydney Gift Fair. To possibly drum up some more business. But we were so tired that we just could not be bothered.
Later that night we were awakened by the smoke alarm going crazy in our room and through the hotel. Looking out in the corridor no one seemed to know what was going on. But for safety precautions we were told to leave the building. After quickly dressing and grabbing the essentials (the computers!) the alarm stopped. I looked out in the corridor and asked one guy who said we could go back to our room. You had to be there and see the funny side.
Sunday morning and we are off to the airport to catch our flight to Santiago. We were on time and it looked like everything was heading in the right direction. The queue was very long but I was not bothered because we were on time. But we should have allowed 3 hours before the scheduled flight time.
Then it's our turn to check in. We knew that we were going to pay for excess baggage and were prepared - but not to be told that we could not go until we could show a return flight from Quito to Santiago which would cost us an extra 00 each. This was an oversight by the travel agent and us. But we wanted to leave our options open. We might not want to come back to Santiago directly from Quito. Or even fly. But we didn't want to pay 00 when we know the flights are very cheap within South America on a One World pass.
Just think of the shows you see on TV like Borderline Etc. Here we were racing with two large trolleys full of our bags to another desk where we had to sort out this mess with the LAN service officer telling us you have 5 minutes and the plane will be closed.
So the simple solution was to leave Ecuador out of the conversation. We told them we would collect our luggage in Santiago. Our on-flight to any other destination was then our problem. They agreed and so we were off. Oh - the excess luggage cost us AU0.00.
Many hours later we arrived in Santiago (via Auckland) with a couple of hours up our sleeve before our next scheduled departure. All we had to do was collect our luggage, go through customs and re-check for our flight to Quito (which we had already booked and paid for).
We proceeded to check out through immigration and then told to pay US0 tax before collecting our luggage and go out and then back in to catch the flight to Quito. This was simply because the LAN rep in Sydney couldn't see her own silly logic. We had a ticket out of Ecuador to Bolivia in three weeks time, but not back to Santiago. Another downside to having to re-check our luggage to Quito was that we had to pay excess luggage again - US0. Because we could not find our receipt for the payment we made in Sydney. Even though we had to pay excess luggage twice, and airport tax at Santiago, it was still cheaper than purchasing two new Santiago-Quito tickets at 00 each. Or sending our excess weight separately. But we should have realized that we needed a ticket back to Santiago from Quito within the allowed time frame. Finally we arrived in Ecuador. At 9 PM on the same day that we left Australia, we arrived in Quito. Everything went so smoothly through immigration and then customs and we were in our hotel at 10 PM. It's as though we had to face and beat many challenges before arriving at our desired destination.
Hasta Luega
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