Homeward Bound

Since our seats on the flight from Santiago to Buenos Aires were right against the rear bulkhead of the plane we were at least in the statistically safest seat in the event of a crash. Though it should be no surprise that we were next to last off the plane after our 9:00pm arrival - with the only ones behind us being an older couple from the other side of the aisle. This also meant that we were the last in the immigration queue for foreigners, where a complication emerged. I had neglected to get the copies of our Argentine Reciprocity Fee receipts from my pack because I didn't think we would need them again - firstly because the fee is good for a 12 month period and we had already entered the country once, and secondly because it isn't supposed to be necessary for stays of less than 12 hours (which was the case for us on this occasion.) However it appeared that they had no record of our entry just under five weeks ago and wanted to see the receipts. A supervisor was summoned and it was beginning to look like one of us would need to go through to the baggage area to retrieve my pack and get the copies from there. Luckily, I suddenly remembered that I still had the original copies we had used stuffed into a pocket of my money pouch - I hadn't actually thrown them out as I had been thinking I could.

Potential crisis averted we passed through customs for the same pre-arranged taxi pick-up process we had enjoyed on our last arrival here. We had originally planned to stay the night at a hotel close to the airport since we had to be back here in about 9-10 hours for our flight home. However, my internet searches didn't turn up any closer than 8 kilometres away, and costing about AU$150 a night, so despite the longer drive it was cheaper to return to the same downtown hostel we had stayed in originally. The taxi ride at this time of night was pretty quick so it didn't take us long to get there and check in. We had a front room overlooking the street again but Thursday nights are evidently much quieter than the Saturday night we experienced previously. And the cute puppy dog on the balcony opposite was still there, with his paws up on the railing watching, and occasionally barking at, the passing traffic.

Sigh...!

We were awake at 5:30am for our taxi back to the airport - hopefully our last early start for a while! The check-in, immigration and security checks went smoothly before our luck with flights on this trip finally ran out. The departure screen announced that our flight had been delayed 90 minutes. Damn, we hadn't needed to get up quite so early after all! Not much to do at the airport or course and as the time dragged by the delay finally came to about two hours before we took off.

Icebergs Ahoy!

Then of course our discomfort was compounded. Despite having the seats next to an emergency exit with no seats in front of us (so plenty of leg room) the centre row just in front of us was home to a couple with twins about 12 months old. Even when they were not grizzling they seemed to like squealing just because they could. But only for about the first 11 hours of the flight, they pretty much passed out for the last four. Sleep was always going to be hard anyway because, unlike our flight over which was in the dark the whole way, this was a daytime flight so our body clocks didn't really start to hit sleep mode until a couple of hours before we landed. This made for about 15 hours of pure tedium, not helped by Aerolineas's choice of in-flight movies, none of which rated more than about 6 on IMDB.com. The one positive from this was that we were able to get some nice views of the Antarctic ice shelf from 10 kilometres up - and some of the icebergs must have been huge given how big they looked from where we were.

Our good track record at getting through Sydney Airport quickly was not tarnished though. After touching down at 2:55pm we were in a taxi on our way home just 45 minutes later, with customs having given the all clear on our collection of woodcrafted lizards. The good news is that our home was intact and the cats were healthy and glad to see us (a neighbour and her children had been feeding them in our absence).

And so ended our Great South American Adventure.