New Zealand Will Have to Wait

Three days ago, it was November 17th. I was in Arequipa, Peru. It was late afternoon and I was sitting in my hostel, working on my computer, waiting around until it was time to head over to the bus terminal to catch an overnight bus to Lima. I needed to be in Lima on the 19th to catch the first of two flights that were supposed to take me out of South America and onwards to New Zealand. I had bookings on cross-continent TACA Peru flight between Lima and Buenos Aires, then a trans-Pacific Aerolineas Argentinas flight from Buenos Aires to Auckland.

I was preparing to be on the North Island on the morning of November 22nd, 2009.

Since these flight bookings were made three months ago, before I left Canada – thanks to an onerous Brazilian Consulate insistence that I needed an onward ticket out of South America before they would give me a visa – I decided to fire off an e-mail to my travel agent back home asking whether I needed to reconfirm my flights.

I received the following e-mail response, just before I had to leave for the bus terminal:

"Hey can you give me a call? There has been a conflicting schedule change!"

I quickly fired off an e-mail reply saying that I wasn't near a phone capable of international calls, and that, regardless, I needed to rush off to catch my bus and would be out of contact until I arrived in Lima the following morning.

Then I started to mentally freak out.

Those of you that know me well know I don't deal well with uncertainty or lack of control. I didn't know what the hell was going on with my flights. I certainly had no control over making any changes to my travel plans – for at least another sixteen hours anyway. To my credit, I calmed myself down soon afterward and told myself that there was absolutely nothing I could do. But the preceding thirty seconds were complete and utter Hell.

I got my taxi to the bus terminal, downed a slug of vodka from a bottle I had in my bag, and got onto the bus.

When I got to Lima, I went straight to the Internet and International Calling Centre in the bus terminal to try to find out what was going on with my flights. Getting my travel agent on the phone, I learned that Aerolineas Argentinas had cancelled the flight for the 21st and needed to rebook me on another flight. They wanted to put me on an earlier flight leaving BsAs at 2:00am on the 20th. Since my original flight from Lima wasn't due to land in BsAs until 4:30am on the 20th, that really was a non-starter. So I requested to be put on the first available flight after November 21st. After all my gushing about Buenos Aires in my last post, having to spend an extra day or two in the city wasn't exactly my idea of hardship.

Well, it turns out that Aerolineas Argentinas isn't exactly the easiest airline to contact whilst back in Canada. My departure date wasn't fully confirmed until early yesterday evening – a full two days after, and just before I had to leave my hostel to catch my flight out of Lima.

It turns out that the Aerolineas flights to Auckland were booked up for a while. I don't leave until 2:00am on December 2nd. I have eleven extra days in Buenos Aires.

Aside from, maybe, a short trip over to Colonia and Montevideo, Uruguay (one or two nights at the most), I'm just going to take this chance to stop travelling, relax and just take time hanging out in one of my favourite cities in South America.

Aerolineas' SNAFU turned out to be a gift.

Related Entries:
1. Buenos Aires

(Acknowledgement: I have to thank Matthew at the Flight Centre at Yonge / Bloor for sorting everything out with Aerolineas)