Very early start this morning – 5:30am alarm to get us up in time to catch our ride to the airport. I didn’t sleep well at all, so it was a bit of a struggle to get going. After a quick breakfast, Patricia picked us up just after 7am to drive us to the airport with all our gear.
We managed to check in okay (no excess baggage for these international LAN flights – yay) and Patricia escorted us to immigration – even helping us jump the very long queues to pass through security, having an infant really helps sometimes. We breezed through immigration – the officer there checked the documentation carefully, but seemed quite happy with it all and let us through with no questions.
After a lengthy wait for our flight to actually leave, we boarded and settled in to our seats. Turns out there are no seats with bassinet positions on this plane, so we were going to have to hold Andres the whole way (6 hours), which was a bit of a pain. Just before we took off, the cabin crew came and asked us to move seats – apparently there were only two oxygen masks in that seat and we needed three in case of emergency. They moved us to a row with three vacant seats, which gave us a little more room and allowed us to put Andres down for a while during the flight too.
It was a boring flight – we didn’t get to watch movies and as we were now in the centre, we couldn’t see out of the windows either. Andres only screamed once when he got hungry all of a sudden but I was in the toilet so couldn’t make his bottle soon enough. Was a little grizzly on the way down, but sucking a dummy helped a bit.
Eventually we got in to Santiago and made it through immigration and collected our bags. We arranged some “official ground transport” from the airport to the Holiday Inn Expres in Las Condes – over the other side of the city, but close to the Australian Embassy where we will need to go tomorrow. It took far less time to get to the hotel than I had thought it would.
The Holiday Inn Express is a fairly basic hotel, but nice enough. It took them a while to get a cot set up for us, but they eventually got it done. The only downside is that there is no restaurant here (they do a cold buffet breakfast though), and so there is no room service, although apparently some of the local restaurants will deliver to the hotel.
There are quite a few restaurants down the same road that the Embassy is on (just around the corner), but of course, most of them are closed on Sunday nights. We ended up with a sandwich and hot chocolate at Starbucks, which was really all we needed anyway. Andres made more new friends there – I feel sorry for the other customers who had to wait for the staff to finish telling Andres how cute he is!
We had a fairly early night – exhausted from the long day.
We are in Katherine,N.T. catching up on the blog. Lovely story and photos. Have a good flight back to Sydney.