punta arenas to la paz in 24 hrs

---

Finally the Patagonia part of trip is over and we had a long flight to Santiago and then onwards to LA Paz , Bolivia. We took a 5:00am taxi to make this flight to be informed at the gate that flight is delayed indefinitely. Ironically the pilot was not able to land the plane due to lack of wind. We had 2hrs to make connection to La Paz that we missed. The person at puenta arenas repeatedly assured us that someone will take care of our connection. But when we reached Santiago, no one was there to help and no one had even heard that flight was delayed. When I went to the counter the lady there took 30min to contact someone and confirm that we missed our connection due to flight delay and we were not just hanging around at their awesome airport. Then after lot of insisting they routed us through Lima at night. Our 4hr flight had become 12hr flight, reaching La Paz at 3:00 in the morning. We had of course missed our onward bus to Uyuni and had wasted one full day and night in transit.

After reaching La Paz, I was quite happy to discover that they managed to deliver our luggage to right place. We spent few hours at airport until day light and then headed straight to Pirwa hostel where I had made a booking and then cancelled it. Luckily there was enough space in the hostel and we found a nice room. The next immediate step was to see if it's possible to climb Licancabur. This proved easier in theory and we booked the tour along with an extra acclimatization climb also. Fingers crossed that it all works out, the tour starts tomorrow.

An interesting surprise of La Paz is it's easy availability of vegetarian food. We already spotted 3 vegetarian restaurants and ate at one. There is also a Indian place called Taj Mahal which we hope to check out later.

---