Writing this blog can sometimes be a challenge either because the lighting in the room is not so great, like tonight, or that too many glasses of wine have passed the lips, like tonight, or that we have done such a lot and seen such a lot that you cannot remember it all, like tonight.
An easy morning with a light breakfast before leaving the Hotel for the airport where they say domestic check is one hour before departure and so to the airport takes about thirty minutes. Looking out of our 18th floor room at 9.30 am there was little, if any, traffic on the roads and so where is everybody ?, wait and you will see.
The driver called Ayrton Senna speeds us to the airport in twenty minutes and because we are foreign people he deposits us in the international departures section and we say we want Domestic and he says down there. So we arrive and there are thousands of people everywhere each, it seems with fifty bags each or thereabouts it seems. I ask a young LAN lady where to check in as there is chaos around us reminding me of my first check at at Mumbai (Bombay) Airport and she says use the automatic check in desk. So I go toe the machine which give me four airlines to choose from and so I choose LAN and then follow some graphics which initially I do not comprehend and some words in Spanish where I have even less chance. The graphics indicate that I should put my passport for scanning and that I will receive our boarding passes poste haste and so the machinery turns and after four minutes or so it delivers three lines with lots of Spanish words which means from my best knowledge of the language ‘clear off’ you have it wrong.
So now I approach a LAN passenger services desk and she says go to check in desks 62 and 63 which we do and each person checking in seems to have a problem and so the fact that we were early at the airport is now fast disappearing out the window.
Finally we are last but one in the queue and then one of the check in girls suddenly disappears under the check in desk after putting up a ‘desk closed’ sign. We cannot understand where she has gone and now both desks are closed!!! What to do as so many people are checking in at the physically disabled desk and they look bloody fit to me.
Suddenly the first lady appears again from below her desk and she has been eating her mid-morning snack and is now ready to work again, phew.
Finally we arrive at the check in and she enters stuff in to the computer and then issues boarding passes and then she look at the printed flight confirmations again and tears up the boarding passes and then after another few minutes of data entry issues us with new boarding passes.
We leave for the gate and sit there for about twenty minutes and then suddenly everybody gets up and leaves??? And a young lady asks us if we are going to Puerto Montt and we say yes, and she says gate has changed.
We finally board the plane at the very back and we think many people have not flown before as many are taking photos and then later in the flight when we start descending we hit a bit of cloud turbulence and the plane drops and a number of of people start screaming, wow this is great.
The taxi meets us and takes us to the Hotel in Puerto Varas and we are given a nice room overlooking the lake but are starving and the restaurant is happy to help us out with two salads and now we can concentrate on the rest of the day.
We walk in to town which appears to be very nice and then come across a special party day where there are hundreds of people who have contributed to a cake competition and there are beer drinking competitions taking place and then dancing competitions, people are having a great time.
We continue our walk around this interesting town and happen upon an ice cream shop where we indulge with a single scoop each and then continue our walking and look at the family’s on the beach with dogs, yes more dogs, sleeping the day away and then on heading home we come across a drum band which sounded a little monotonous after a while but we perseveredBack to the Hotel which is very nice except for the large lump of broken glass which Noel nearly put his knee on and missed it by two inches, that would have been a big ouch!! And even bigger insurance claim.
We had dinner in the Hotel and it was very good indeed and the shrimps and crab and skate and salmon were all excellent.
Then back to the room for blogging and finishing photos but the internet connection is intermittent and also slow.
Tomorrow is an early morning as we go across the Lakes and use buses to cross the magnificent Andes Mountains.
