There´s a new pace of life in town.....

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So we got here safely, both with very confused heads since local time was 2pm on 15th Oct but in our heads it was about 3am on the 16th Oct. Had to be up at 4am the next morning to fly onto Quito and so had to stay awake until at least 7pm to try to get our sleeping patterns back in check.

Got up at 4 am as planned, went into check in at the airport, queued for over an hour only to be told when we got to the front of the queue, that we had to go and stand in a second queue. Queued there for another 20 mins just to then be told that our flight to Quito had been cancelled. No best chuffed since its still only 6am, we have nowhere to go, no-one speaks english and they´re telling us that the next flight isnt until 4pm tomorrow. This means that we would lose all our time in Quito and the briefing meeting for our tour.

I threw a strop (as many would have guessed)which is not very productive, but a tired Amy makes for a grumpy amy.

They booked us into a hotel at the airport so we at least had a roof over our heads and told us that they would sort our the flights in an hour or so, vagueness was rife here. A little checking on the internet showed us that there was a flight tomorrow morning that they hadnt told us about and so we went back to find the service desk to ask to be put onto that flight instead. The company was nowhere to be found, and we discovered using our pidgeon spanish that TACA only fly once a day from Santiago and that they did not have a customer service desk. Instead what they did have is a sweaty little office hidden int he deepest darkest depths of the airport that took us the best part of 1/2 hour to find (bearing in mind that the airport is small). Tracked down the guy that we had spoken to earlier and he said that he would get us on that flight and that he would sort it out later. Given how poor these guys had been till now, we decided to sit and wait in the hope of instilling some action into him. Anyway, long story short, he got us onto the flight we wanted, he gave us vouchers for all our meals in the meantime and the tickets were delivered to our hotel.

Turns out, what we mistook to be unhelpfulness was just a different pace of life to us. The lesson from today....there´s a new pace of life in town that we´re going to have to embrace......

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