Finding Santiago

In my first terrifying foray into Spanish I had successfully (I think) made a reservation at the Hotel Foresta. After arming myself with more Spanish phrases and then failing to find a baggage enquiries office, my bag had mysteriously appeared on the carousel with all the others, so I took a van from the airport with a few other people in. As we were driving I kept having to remind myself to look out of the window – to see where I was, what it was like. I was in Chile! What was Chile? I had no idea what to expect. I remember those first taxi rides from the airports in Hyderabad and Bombay, how I would always drink in the atmosphere, the experience of India! The only feeling I got from Santiago was that of a city. Just any city. I got to the hotel where the clerk spoke enthusiastic English, a little old man carried my heavy case up in the lift, I tipped him (probably not enough) and finally collapsed on the bed in the small room looking at stripy wallpaper with flowers on.

Having arrived on Sunday evening, I ended up staying another two days in Santiago before flying out. Having found the two other volunteers for the project who were also due to catch the same plane, I set out to find Chile. I found mountains! They had snow on!!!! I may have been illogically overexcited by this, but – there was snow! And they were huge! Just sitting there next to the city! Anyway, I don’t think I’ve ever seen snow-covered mountains before so I thought that was pretty cool. We also found a zoo, in which lived elephants, lions, tigers, two polar bears and some condors in some quite small enclosures. The condors’ cage did not resemble jungle. We found various unhealthy types of food, a posh Italian restaurant that didn’t open till 8pm, cheap clothes that we didn’t have room to buy, museums that were all closed on Mondays and some hummingbirds on a hill. On the night before we were due to leave, after dinner and a hot chocolate, we failed, for some time, to find an ATM at which to withdraw all the money we would need for our 2-3 months stay on the bank-free island. We eventually reached a room of cash machines in the centre of town which you used your card to get into and withdrew some quite large sums of money – I had 200,000 Chilean pesos (about 200 quid) stuffed into my back pocket. It was around 10pm. Coming out of the ATM room I didn’t see anyone hanging around looking suspicious which was reassuring, and we set off back to the hotel. We were particularly wary after an incident earlier in the day when two young guys had run into us from behind (quite hard) and then made off down the street followed some time afterwards by a poor man yelling; they had made off with his laptop and he seemed to have little chance of catching them. Halfway back to the hotel Kelly (who it turns out graduated from APU in 2005) commented that she may have been being paranoid but a guy with a lip-piercing had passed us while we were getting out money and had then changed direction twice and had been following us. Worrying, but he’d luckily disappeared. At the next crossroads a skinny guy passed in front of us then started up the same street on the other side just slightly behind – “that’s him” muttered Kelly. I decided she wasn’t being paranoid. We marched back to the hotel really rather fast, hardly speaking until we got there. We decided that next time we’d get money out in the day time.

On Wednesday morning we left early in a large multi-seater and ended up in a pretty posh-looking lounge in a building round the back of the international airport. In the car park-sized space in front of us were two small planes and a helicopter. The luggage allowance was 10kg so I was charged 25 pounds for the extra 9 kilos of my large suitcase, but luckily not for my suddenly 87kg person. I drank my first latte – it was very nice. We squeezed onto a plane with about 10 seats in the front and the luggage in the back and the pilots visible through the open curtain at the front. I accidentally sat on my lunch, packed into a brown paper bag. Less than half an hour in we had left the coast of mainland Chile behind us.

At the airport, wish you were here.

I spent the entire flight from Jo’berg to Sau Paulo worrying about missing my connection (partly to avoid having to watch Spiderman 3 again). I had 40 minutes to catch my plane to Santiago, Chile, with a completely different airline, and I was constantly thinking about how late we’d left, how much the wind would slow us up, whether the original ETA was still accurate, whether that included taxi-ing, how long it would take me to get off from the back of the plane and what I was supposed to do before being able to get on the next flight. In the back of a small notebook in my bag I found all the Portuguese phrases I had written down when Adam and I got stuck in Brazil due to a gone-bust airline and thought we’d have to spend the night at the airport last summer. Instead we got flown first class to Frankfurt (reassuringly in-Europe) but I wasn’t planning on relying on such good luck again. I disembarked with five minutes until my flight was supposed to leave with no idea whether I had the slightest chance of being on it; I rushed anyway. I arrived at the gate far quicker than I had expected/feared. Some people looked at my e-ticket and nodded and talked in Portuguese. I got handed over to a helpful looking man. It was 16.30 – the exact time my flight was supposed to leave and I was standing in front of the gate. “Ah,” said the man looking at the print-out, “you’re supposed to be on this flight!”. Yes, I nodded, that was the problem. Typing things into his computer he commented that it was too late, the doors had closed. I resisted the temptation to go to the window and watch my plane leave in a tragic-looking way. The man handed me something – it was a boarding pass. He’d put me on the next flight in two hours. Oh! Well that was ok then! I was so relieved I forgot to ask what would happen to my luggage. I waited for the next flight at the suspiciously familiar-looking departure lounge (where over 12 months before I had emerged from the toilet to hear a mangled version of my name on the tannoy and then failed to understand why they were changing our boarding cards) and decided that Sau Paulo airport was more fun when Adam was there.