I wasn’t suppossed to go to Santiago.  On January 9th, I had a flight at 7:30 pm from Buenos Aires which was to land in Santiago at 9:45 and then I had a flight at 11:30 pm to Auckland, New Zealand.  When I arrived at the airport in Buenos Aires, it was pretty clear that something was wrong.  Every window was opened in the checkin counter, but the line wasn’t moving.  Each transaction was taking forever.  There was probably only about 15 people ahead of me, but it took over an hour to finally get to the counter.  It turns out that the flight to Santiago was going to be two hours late and therefore I would miss my connection.  It was a huge plane and many people also had connections that would have to be changed which is why it was such chaos at the check in counter.  Since there is only one flight per day to Auckland there was not much they could do besides put us all in a hotel and put us on the flight for the following day.  It took another hour for her to make the changes to the Auckland flight and to print my boarding pass.  I had arrived at the airport at 5:10 and it wasn’t until 7:00 that I finally had my boarding passes.

The flight didn’t end up taking off until 11:45 pm and landed in Santiago at 2:00 am in the morning.  This is where the real disaster happened.  The Santiago staff apparently didn’t realize that many of us would need a hotel room and many others needed flight changes.  Once off the plane there was a line of about at least 150 people at the passenger services desk and there was only one worker.  It was utterly ridiculous.  I assumed they would have all the hotel vouchers ready to go when we got off the plane.  I didn’t end up getting to the hotel until 4:45 am (one guy didn’t get there until 6:15!).  Luckily for me it was the Crown Royal Plaza which is most likely the best hotel I’ve ever stayed in.  It was phenomenal.  I was just glad to have my own room.  I had wanted to send a bunch of stuff home when I got to New Zealand so having a ton of room to be able to unpack everything to figure out what to keep and what to send was great.

Having the day in Santiago was great because one of my friends from the Antarctic cruise was there.  He was spending a few days there so we met up for a few hours.  I had some errends to run (sending stuff home, buying an iPod), but then we also had some fun at the pool in my hotel.  I didn’t have too much energy since I had only three hours of sleep the night before but it was still a great day.  That night the flight to Auckland went off without a hitch!