Ushuaia to BA .. and a kick in the guts!

Woke up in our little double bed in our turquoise room at 8am. No rush to get up as our flight out of Ushuaia wasn’t until 18.35.
Up at 10am and sat on the phone for 2 hours to Qantas to try to get a refund sorted for our original flight home - no luck and we had to hang up to leave.
At 1pm we had to wake our hosts up to explain to him that we wanted to check out now in order to get to the airport but if our flight didn’t go we had paid for tonight’s stay so we would be back. Poor man had been on late shift as a policeman but he was very lovely and called a taxi to take us to the airport.
We had decided to try to get on standby for the 14.30 flight Ushuaia to BA as we were just super worried we wouldn’t get out of Ushuaia before they stopped all domestic flights 20th-25th March which would mean we would miss our AirNz flight to Auckland. At the airport there was just a mass of people and a queue and a guy making announcements in Spanish. It soon became clear we were too late! There was already obviously a waitlist for this flight and soon they were calling at least 20-30 people’s names- bugger. We so could have done with getting on that plane.
Also in the melee were Josh, Tania and Greg and a few other Quark shipmates- none of us successful on the earlier flight but we all had tickets for either 18.35 or 20.30 flights to BA so there was still hope!
Tania and Greg were actually trying to buy an earlier Latam flight just to get to BA and thy had planned to go straight to Ezeiza airport to try to get on the Airnz flight that leaves at 11.45pm tonight.
Anyway we queued for check in super early to make sure we got on and before long we had boarding passes in hand... but couldn’t relax until the plane flew in at 18.00.
Relief was abound as we all queued to board the plane. Claire ended up being seated in premium economy whilst we ended up sitting next to Vlad one of the Quark guides.
The 3.5 hour flight left on time and a a was uneventful apart from the last 10 mins when Vlad got a txt message from Katrina the Kiwi kayak Quark guide saying she was the holder of the “last golden boarding pass” .... and then Vlad says there are no more AirNZ flights after tonight. We explained that AirNZ was flying until Mar 30th and we had a ticket for 25th.... Vlad shakes his head and shows us the NZ Herald page which says AirNZ is suspending all flights out of Argentina effective immediately!! WTF??!!! They had just stranded us- all of us!! Not one of us had received an email informing us- we were all in total disbelief but at the same time totally knackered from all of the stress.
Tanya and Greg still wanted to head straight over to the international airport even though there was no way they were going to get that last flight whose doors were shutting in 15 mins.
The wind had been kicked out of us and K, Claire and I worked out how to get a taxi to our accommodations- had to get a ticket snd queue and then be directed to a taxi.
Sadly we got a female taxi driver that looked like she was having a v v bad day and soon began ranting at us in Spanish- not what we wanted at 11.30pm. To cut a long story short we ended up having to pay twice the recommended amount but we finally got dropped off - firstly Claire to her Airbnb and then us back to the A Hotel.
On checking in we were told the hotel was in lockdown and we couldn’t go out for food or water and also they didn’t know if they would be allowed to be open tmrw or any day after! At this point we really were just too tired, hungry, dehydrated and thoroughly despondent. We had discussed that if we couldn’t get out of BA we would need to just ride out the quarantine but would need a hotel that had a restaurant or served food.
We had a quick look at booking.com but it was impossible to tell which ones would take us and which wouldn’t.
The plan for tmrw was to access food ? For at least a week in case we were really locked own, and then deal with the fact we now didn’t have a flight out and were technically stranded in Argentina. Not a great feeling or position to be in. Not much sleep was had and poor K was now really in the grips of the ‘ship cold’ that had been passed around.
We were still couldn’t believe AirNZ had stranded us! So gutted... not to mention the cost of the flights we had paid to them. We were actually angry more than anything- why sell flights 2 days ago that they knew they wouldn’t be able to deliver?
Tmrw is another day and we were a bit grateful that at least we had made it to BA. One step closer to home.Read more