Lima, Lima, Peru
Sunday, July 5, 2015
Time is up... Time to head home today, we have been here for 26 days now and all good things must come to an end. In saying that, the last day is a very long one, around 24 hours of flights and stopovers.
The title of this blog is named the way it is basically due to how confusing the number of days gets on this last leg, it's still only a day, but we leave on Sunday and arrive Tuesday yet only travel for a day.
We went downstairs this morning a little before 9am to find our taxi waiting for us, not bad really. Taxis have usually been a few minutes late, so was good to see that our last one was actually early for a change. The trip to the airport went smoothly and probably had the least traffic on the road in Lima that I had ever seen in our time being there, granted it is Sunday and people generally don't work on Sunday, but I still expected a longer ride to the airport than what we had.
Arriving in Chile, we made our way toward the far end of the terminal to our gate, pretty well much as far as we could go. Thankfully it's near Starbucks so have had unlimited Wi-Fi the entire time we have been here.
Bruno has been catching up on some sleep while we have been here, while I've been trying to fix my tablet which started to play up yesterday morning. It's also made things a bit harder for Bruno to message on Facebook seeing he no longer has his phone, although he has been able to borrow my other one when I haven't required it. The Chile airport is quite a bit colder than it is in Peru, and while I've been looking outside the window at the airport I've seen more rain than our entire trip away.
We went and grabbed a bite to eat for dinner at some restaurant in the airport, Chicken with Hickory sauce for me and along with some mashed potatoes and broccoli, very well cooked and probably the last good meal we will eat until we are back home. Certainly better than the biscuits that we both considered snacking on. We played a game of chess over dinner to help kill some time as well.
The stopover waiting time had practically come to an end so we decided it was time to head to our gate (which was basically right next to where we were). We got to the gate and waited. While we waited we thought there seemed to be a lot of Mexicans at the terminal, we certainly didn't think that many would be going to New Zealand or Australia (Australia went via NZ). Bruno checked with the people at the gate who advised us that our gate had been changed to 14, well thanks for putting that up on the board I thought seeing there had been no mention on that change. So we headed all the way back from where we originally entered the airport to gate 14, only to arrive and see that gate was assigned to fly to New York, we were then told we needed to go to Gate 20 (still no sign of that on the departure board). We made our way all the way down to that gate, about as far if not a wee bit further to what we had already walked. We met a few others at the gate who had the same issue as us.
As we proceeded through the gate we were then stopped half way down for a baggage check, silly, I'd already been through two bag checks from the time I got to the Airport in Lima, and through the security check at this airport when I arrived, I really don't know what they expected to find considering we hadn't even left the airport, but after that we were able to board the plane.
The plane was delayed leaving Chile which is going to push thing for us, if the plane had left on time we would have just over an hour and a half to clear customs in Auckland, get our tickets to Christchurch and get to the domestic airport. Chances of us catching our plane to Christchurch are even less as we are also seated about 3 seats from the back of the plane, so that won't help either.