Day 74: Travel day - Cusco to Santiago

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We allowed ourselves a little sleep-in, then rugged up in all our winter gear again and trundled down to the coldest breakfast room ever. Telling you what, Hotel Sol Inka really needs to invest in some heaters cos we basically breathe frost each time we try take a bite!



We got ourselves all packed up and dumped our stuff down at the hotel reception and took a quick wander up town for an early lunch. We settled on the little bakery we had lunch at the first day we were in Cusco before the Jungle Trail. Before we knew it, it was approaching noon and we had to get back to our hotel, grab our bags and flagged down the nearest cab, a shady looking little hatchback; the boot only big enough for Rach's bag with mine playing passenger in the front seat.

We arrived at the airport, checked ourselves in and found a little coffee shop which had free wifi which allowed us to waste away the hour break we had. We took off and managed to catchup on Game of Thrones season finale before landing for our stop-over in dirty, ugly Lima. Thankfully we only had to stop-over here and not spend anymore time here as it doesn't look that exciting. Fortunately, the Lima airport is pretty modern and has a nice big food court and shops to waste the time away. After skyping Rach's nanny and gramps for 45 mins at Starbucks, we didn't have a lot of time so quickly grabbed some takeaway subway and ran to our gate to catch our flight to Santiago.

We boarded our flight and my god were we in a space-age looking aircraft. It was a new 787 or something but looked so futuristic. The windows were massive and the cabin was lit by these strange neon lights that kept changing colours like we were in some kind of funky disco or something. It was pretty funny. We managed to draw our attention away from the colourful lights and catch an episode of Homeland, and I also got a few chapters into my new read, Dan Brown's new book Inferno (and it has got me absolutely hooked, and its so cool how its set in Florence as we were there only last year!!). Before we knew it, we'd landed in Santiago!

As we were wandering through the airport towards immigration, I caught sight on the Australian flag on one of the signs. That's a bit weird I thought, then I saw another one together with the USA, Canada, Mexican and Albanian flags. It was an odd collection of flags however next to them my heart sank as I read “Reciprocity Fee →”. Bugger!! Apparently as a privilege citizen and holder of an Australian Passport, I'm required to contribute USD$95 just to enter Chile!! My memory is still quite fresh of Turkey last year when both Kate and I had to pay €45ea to enter the country, whilst our accompanying Kiwi citizen got to waltz in Scott-free. Well, history appears to have repeated itself, our foreign relations department clearly not doing their job properly, having pissed off the Chileans who have slapped a juicy big fee for yours truly just to walk through the front door. And we were only staying the one night!!

Anyway, through gritted teeth I paid the $95, the Kiwi smirking and telling me how awesome it is to be from New Zealand and joined the worlds biggest immigration line. It was about midnight by this point but thankfully it moved pretty quickly and soon enough we were out, collected our bags and found a taxi who would run us into town.



We got into town and looked around for a sign saying Nativa Suites. The taxi driver pulled up outside a block of apartments (which had no distinguishable signs on it) and told us this was the place. I was a bit skeptical so jumped out, ran inside and asked the security guy on the desk whether this was the right place...”Si” was all I got out of him however it was good enough for me. He handed us the key and we went up to our little apartment, a 1 b/r plus loungeroom and kitchenette little place. It was quite cool and a pity we were only here for one night. As Rach soon discovered though, the hot water was distinctly lacking so maybe it was a good thing we were only here the one night. Massive travel day done...another one tomorrow as we head further south to Bariloche.

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Comments

[pater]

I FINISHED that book last week, yes is a good book and being based in Venice and Florence made it morenjoyable .I even recognised some of the places .Enjoying your blogs Love Dad