Montevideo

The problem with going to remote places like El Chantel is that one has to extract oneself from the place and this inevitably chews up a couple days of your holiday. Friday we took the bus back to El Calafate and stayed in a small cabin at a hostel. El Calafate seemed to be even more touristy than when we were there a week ago. We ate out at a bakery and called an early night as our flight to BA and then on to Montvideo was scheduled at 8:20.

Saturday turned into a rough travel day. Things had started going badly a month before though. Initially our flight was scheduled to leave El Calafate at 1 pm which would connect to a flight in the late afternoon to Montevideo. Aerolineas Argentina changed the MV flight so we would have only 20 minutes to connect. As such I decided to change our BA flight to 8:20 as this was the only other option. I don't like early morning flights as I don't sleep very well anticipating that I will have to get up early. Of course I didn't sleep very well Friday night and woke up way too early and lay awake in bed for a long time before the alarm went off at. 5:30 am. Then I realized that I had forgotten to get our boarding passes so I frantically tried to navigate the user unfriendly AA website in Spanish as the time ticked down to 6 am and the arrival of the cab. Fortunately I had prepacked the night before. Our cab was punctual and we got out to the airport by 6:20 only to find that we were there 40 minutes too early as the baggage and security screening didn't open until 7. I had asked the night at the hotel about what time to get to the airport and the hotel clerk didn't know. Our next problem developed when we were boarding the plane. When we tried to scan our boarding passes for the flight to BA, they didn't work. We were pulled from the line and told that we had to have proof that we would be leaving Montevideo such as a copy of our ferry ticket back to BA. I hadn't bought the tickets yet. They finally accepted our tickets for our flight home but the desk agent was going to bar us from the flight. My phone was glitching because of poor cell service in the airport but fortunately Cheryl was able to produce our flight number. She told us that we would have to buy the ferry tickets in BA on our layover to prove that we were planning to leave Montevideo which we did on our phones in the airport. We flew into the AEP airport and because we were flying onto Montevideo we had to leave the secure area and head to international. This part of the airport was incredibly busy and loud and there were only a few gates. Our flight was to have left at 4:40 pm but didn't leave until 7:20. If we had taken the later flight from El Calafate we would have had plenty of time to make our connection. I fell asleep in the airport for a while but was feeling pretty rough by the time we got to board our plane. I went to the desk agent to show him our ferry tickets and he looked totally confused and told me that he didn't really need to know if I was coming back from Montevideo. Customs also didn't ask us about our return plans. I can't help but wonder whether the first agent was confused over her responsibilities. We Ubered in from the airport and collapsed with exhaustion into the Air BnB bed.

The only amusing thing that happened all day was meeting Pele the El Calafate cat. There was a cat waiting in the departure area when we showed up. One doesn't typically see a cat wandering around an airport. I went to investigate and he was waiting for a shop keeper to show up at 6:30. As soon as she showed up he followed her into her shop where she told me she would feed him and give him some affection.Leggi altro