Yesterday did not start so well. My sleep was rather erratic, so I woke up in a bad mood. The taxi ride to the airport in Chile took a long time because of the traffic, but I had allowed plenty of time, so I still got to the airport with 2 hours to spare. For some reason I was not able to use the check-in machines, so I had to wait in a very long, very slow moving queue. That in itself was annoying, but more annoying was there seemed to be lots of staff at the counters just chatting, rather than dealing with the people in the queue. Airports are annoying at the best of times, but this sort of thing makes my blood boil.
After getting checked in, it was time to go through immigration control. Once again a long queue. This time there were two people processing the queue. One seemed reasonably efficient, but the other guy looked like he was chatting to people as they went through. One family went through his desk and he stamped the passports, then chatted to them for about 10 minutes. They appeared to be laughing and joking. It was now time for my plane to board and I was practically volcanic.
I got through security and rushed to my gate. The wrong plane was there. I checked the boards and they still said my plane was meant to be there. After a bit of panic, I realised the previous plane at that gate had not taken off yet. Rather than updating the departures board to say there was a delay, they just kept the same information on them, relying on the fact you would work it out. I was now on the verge of supernova.
We finally boarded the plane and I sat down in the smallest seat known to mankind. Everyone had brought on too many pieces of hand luggage, meaning I had to leave my laptop half way down the plane from where I was sitting. Why don’t they just enforce the rules? They say one piece of hand luggage, then let everyone on with three, plus coats and handbags and a baby with a pushchair, then try to ram everything into the overhead compartments. It’s never going to work and it’s likely to break sensitive electronic goods in the process. All the mass in the universe had now compacted into an infinitesimally small space and I was at the smallest fraction of a second before the big bang took place…
Just before I had a complete temper tantrum, the staff on the plane disarmed me by being really nice. That was very lucky, or I would probably have missed this leg of the trip while cooling down in jail…
The flight was pretty uneventful, apart from the snoring of the guy sitting next to me.
I arrived in Peru, and got a taxi to the hotel. This taxi ride will probably be one of the highlights of the tour. My taxi driver was a robo-babe from beyond infinity. She cranked up the radio in the car, playing a rock station, then proceeded to drive like she was being chased by the devil. At one point about eight lanes merged into 2 and she beat down lorry drivers and bus drivers like they were little grannies on push-bikes. Driving in Peru seems to be based totally on commitment. If you drive like you don’t want to live, you get priority. This woman was immortal, so we were bound to come out on top. After a little over an hour, we arrived at my hotel without so much as a scratch. I think I should have been scared, but I felt like a little kid saying, “Do it again!” She really should be the star of the next Fast & Furious movie!
So all in all, a very good end to an extremely frustrating day…
I slept OK, but I’ve still got some catching up to do, so I hope I don’t spend the whole day yawning. I’m just about to go down and register for today’s conference. Wish me luck!
Cheers
Tim…