After a couple of hours sleep, we were up and breakfasting . According to a piece of paper that was shoved under our door, our airline organised bus was due to pick us up at 11:30 (this was different to what we were told airport).

In what we hoped wouldn’t be indicative of flights with LAN for the remainder of the trip, 11:30 came and went with no bus, then the hotel (who had phoned the airline) said it would be here at 12:15 (it didn’t arrive). By 12:25 we had made alternative arrangements and were on our way to the airport via a town car.

The ride to the airport was interesting. I’ve come to the conclusion that I wouldn’t want to drive around Quito, it’s crazy with cars cutting off trucks and buses just doing what ever they want.

At one point during the trip, while in the middle of a sleepy stare, I looked out the window and we were sitting next to a garbage truck. This is when I saw a human hand lying in the garbage, given I’d had about 4 hours of broken sleep, I wasn’t sure if I was seeing things or not . So I double checked, yes there was a hand. Thankfully I then realised the hand belonged to one of the garbage men who was lying in the back resting until it was to start work again, I just couldn’t see the rest of his body.

Through the whole experience, the Quito hotel we had been staying at had been nothing but helpful. They had many grumpy passengers on their hands and they treated us all very well. Interesting, the
hotel we were being put up at was holding a high level conference. Even more interestingly, most of the attendees were dressed in variations of police/military garb. It kind of explained why there was an ambulance on standby outside and a lot of security hanging around.

Now back to the airport. After cornering an airport employee, we were issued with our boarding passes and made our way through security, where we each had our water confiscated.

 As expected, I once again had an issue with immigration. Once again I had to fill in an entry form (just like the one I did on the ship and again at the airport). When the guy saw I had two Ecuadorian stamps that had been voided, he looked at me and I swear he twitched. It was at this point, I sensed he had no idea what to do next. I explained what had happened in the preceding 24 hours – I entered the country via cruise ship in Manta, flew to Quito, went through immigration to exit, the ship issued stamp was too faint, so yesterday you photocopied my passport and customs form, then my flight to Lima was cancelled, LAN took my passport to get the exit stamp voided but when they did mine they stamped the wrong one, so they then voided the other one, now I’m heading towards my reschedule flight to Lima.

After about 10 minutes, he came out of the office with a stack of papers (I’m assuming it was the photocopies from yesterday) and then stamped my passport with the exit stamp.

While we were making our way through the Duty Free shop, we heard one of the Zumba songs. So bags got dropped and the Zumba routine started… remember we hadn’t slept much and were a little bit stressed about getting out of Quito!

 Fun and games over, we headed towards a gate to wait for our flight to have a gate number issued. I should also add that prior to leaving the hotel earlier in the morning, I had checked our slight status and we already showing an hour delay. Eventually we were given a gate and told the flight was on time. Unfortunately, at the time we were supposed to start boarding, there was no plane in sight. As expected when people were enquiring about the flight, they were getting the standard ‘it will arrive as soon as possible’ response. Then to make people even more annoyed, they changed our gate number.

After about a 90 minute delay, we finally boarded the plane and were on our way to Lima. We got a little bit of a sunset over the Andes, but I think most of the flight was done in darkness, so who knows what we flew over.

Unlike Ecuador, Peru welcomed my passport with open arms and after a very short exchange about how long we were staying, we were on our way.

Having cleared Immigration and Customs, it was time to once again breathe deeply and approach the LAN counter to get our next lot of boarding passes and another hotel voucher. As we went through exit, I saw a sign with Mum’s name on it. The tour company in Lima had sent a representative to help us – this was good, except some of the group had already gone ahead to try to get the process started and the tour guide didn’t quite understand we needed to find them (she was wanting to double check our passports).

Eventually we were reunited
with the rest of the group and the guide spoke to LAN about our hotel and
boarding passes. I think LAN wanted us to queue up the next morning to get our
passes but we said ‘no, we want them tonight so that we just turn up and get on
the plane’. I think everyone thought we had suitcases to check in and were
surprised when we said we only had hand luggage. As seems to be the case most
of the time, it took forever and several times I could see Spanish speaking
passengers trying to push in front of us to get the LAN person’s attention, the
guide just keep speaking to the LAN person and I think even body blocked
someone.

 

The guide worked with LAN to organise taxi’s to the hotel. When we got to the taxi, the guide was very insistent that we have nothing in the car with us – from reading about some of the area of crime, I figured we may have been asked to do something like that anyway.

The hotel was 30 minutes away and after queuing for a while at the hotel to check in (it was another case of them wanting a copy of our passport and immigration card), eating a stupidly quick dinner, getting to our room and finding the key doesn’t work, then being read the riot act for demagnetising the key (I called BS and said, we got the key 30 minutes ago and it hasn’t been near anything like a mobile phone), we were tucked up in bed by 11pm ready and waiting for our 4:50am wake up call.

Fun fact:On the drive to the hotel, I noticed that Lima has many small Casino’s. So many bright lights, almost like Vegas. We later found out that most of them just have slot machines and only about five had your typical games like Blackjack and Poker.

AltitudeLima sits at around 550m above sea level.