Well, I was supposed to be home by now. But alas, here I am, still in Lima, due to a string of bad luck with flights. Watarimono fell asleep on the job, I guess. Or he drank too many mojitos last night. One of those.
Brutally early from La Paz
My day started at the brutal hour of 1:30am, when my alarm went off after I’d gotten maybe two hours of light sleep. I stumbled into my airport taxi, arriving at La Paz airport a little after 2:30 to check in for my 5:40am flight to Lima.
La Paz’s airport, actually in neighbouring El Alto, is not very big and not very busy. Due to the altitude, it is very expensive and fuel-consuming for planes to fly in and out of there, so there are few flights that actually head that way. I checked in, quickly realized that everything in the airport was closed, and put my head down on my daypack on one of the uncomfortable seats by the food court to try to catch a few zs.
Security and customs were a breeze, and we boarded without incident around 5am. It looked like all would be fine for the 5:40 departure. However, we then proceeded to sit at the gate for an hour and a half, while the maintenance crew tried to repair some sort of mechanical issue with the plane, and then waited for clearance to depart.
My flight had already been delayed an hour due to unknown reasons, causing me to rebook my onward connection from Lima to go via Miami instead of the original plan, which was to fly through Mexico City. There were eight passengers on our flight who were connecting to Miami, and the flight crew swore up and down that we’d make it, that they’d called ahead to let them know, that we’d be met at arrival by an agent who would speed us through security and take us right to the gate, that they’d hold the plane for us.
All lies. When we landed — an hour and a half past schedule — we loaded onto the same bus as everyone else, waited in the same security line, and mad-dash sprinted to the gate only to be told that the flight was closed. We’d missed it.
LATAM transfer desk incompetence
Frustrated and exhausted, I made my way to the transfer desk with the other stranded passengers to attempt to get a rebooking for the second time. I knew it would be a pain, since I’d looked into options yesterday to connect to Montreal and still get home by tonight, and I knew there were only a couple of them.
The good news was, like any good travel ninja worth her salt, I had the flight numbers handy to feed to the transfer desk agents: An option through Washington DC with LATAM connecting to United. Another through Miami, but on Avianca instead of LATAM. There were only a few options, but I tried them all. Everything I suggested should have been possible. But the problem was, it took the LATAM agents so long to do anything at all, that one by one the possible flights closed up or passed their departure time.
It took nearly four hours for LATAM to sort out this mess. At that point, I’d been awake for nearly 30 hours straight, I hadn’t eaten anything since last night, and I was falling down on my feet. I gave up at that point on getting home today, knowing all the possible flight options were gone that would allow me to do that. And I requested to be put back on my original Aeromexico itinerary, only tomorrow instead of today. I figured that way, I’d get home 24 hours later than planned, but at least I could go to a hotel and get some sleep in between.
LATAM agreed to process that for me, and gave me a meal voucher for lunch. I headed up to the food court to get something to eat. When I got back downstairs, however, they informed me that the Mexico City flights were full for tomorrow. So instead, they’d rebooked me on an Air Canada flight through Toronto. Departing at 3am. On Rouge.
Fuck. My. Life.
Day sleeper
It was futile to argue any more with them. Clearly, they were not going to budge. So I accepted the hotel and taxi vouchers that they gave me, went through immigration, picked up my bag, and headed into Lima to the hotel to try to get a few hours of sleep before my flight.
The hotel they booked me into, in San Isidro, was actually quite nice, though I was barely awake enough to notice. I fell into my room and essentially collapsed to sleep for the next few hours. I’m sure if I’d been more awake, I might’ve taken advantage of the extra few hours in Lima to go for some ceviche or at least a pisco sour. But that wasn’t happening in the state I was in. Luckily, the hotel had excellent blackout curtains on the windows.
I was unceremoniously woken up after about three hours of sleep by the front desk, asking me when I wanted to be woken up to go to the airport. Um, how about, not yet? Thanks a lot. Once up, though, I figured it was about the best I was going to do.
I had a shower and headed down to the restaurant for some food, also on the airline’s dime. The restaurant only had beef or pork going, but they were nice enough to whip up a vegetarian Peruvian rice concoction for me when I asked. I ate in the near-empty restaurant, accompanied by those weird jazz cover tunes of pop songs that seem to exist everywhere in these parts. Hey, at least it wasn’t pan flute music.
Third time’s a charm?
Soon, I’ll be getting a taxi back to the airport, to give my third and hopefully final flight itinerary the old college try. I can’t say I’m looking forward to 8 hours on a Rouge plane, but hopefully I’ll be tired enough that I can get some sleep anyway.
By the time I get home, assuming all goes well with these next flights, it will have taken me over 36 hours to get from La Paz to Montreal. That may not be a record but certainly seems close. Plus, I lose my much-needed rest day before going back to work. Tuesday morning should be interesting. I hope there’s coffee.
Right now I’m just skimming through some of my previous blog entries to remind myself why I put myself through this. And, until we invent teleportation, I’m likely to keep doing so. After all, travel is awesome. It’s the getting to and from that isn’t so much fun.
More from home tomorrow — I hope.