I couldn't help but feel a twinge of disappointment when I saw the itinerary for our journey home to New Zealand after three years of missionary service in South America. This time, we were not doing the long haul flight from Buenos Aires to Auckland –all fifteen hours of it, broken only by a brief halt in Patagonia. Instead of heading to Argentina after leaving Bolivia, we would spend the night in Santiago, Chile, then fly via Easter Island to Tahiti, where we would spend a few hours before catching the connecting flight to Auckland. If we'd timed our flight for another day, we would have spent an extra day in Tahiti. Oh well. At least stopping to refuel Easter Island would be interesting.
The flights from La Paz to Arica to Santiago were pretty uneventful, with no dramas over passports or visas... unless you count the aftershave my father had stowed in my cabin baggage (his was full) leaking and a small child in a seat near mine throwing up and getting some on the pink straw hat I had put on the floor temporarily. So we boarded the Lan Chile flight out of... read more >>
South America Travel Stories
This was it. We had finally touched down in Argentina, our first introduction to South America. I was thirteen, traveling with my parents and my two little brothers for a three-year term of missionary service. According to our tickets, we were to spend the night in Buenos Aires in a hotel (included in the ticket price) before catching our connecting flight to Bolivia. Jetlagged after a twelve-hour flight from Auckland, New Zealand, to Buenos Aires, we staggered onto the airport bus along with all the other people catching connecting flights. It had grown dark, as the flight had been delayed, and the lights of Buenos Aires revealed buildings, boulevards and sidewalk hoardings.
The bus pulled up outside the hotel and we all started looking around for our cabin baggage. The bus driver got out and spoke to the person at the door of the hotel. Unfortunately, there seemed to be a problem. A helpful Uruguayan businessman in the bus explained to those of us with only elementary Spanish what was going on: thanks to that delayed flight, the hotel didn’t have enough rooms free for all of us, but the hotel receptionist had... read more >>