End of Rio beginning of a messy journey!

Ola! I'm finally in Peru now.

My last day in Rio was great fun, we braved the bus amid all the warnings about pickpockets and scoundrels and we got to the Corcovado, or to us English the way to the Christ the Redeemer statue that overlooks Rio.

To get there you get on this old tram system which is the most random thing, its built all like a theme park entrance at the bottom (I half expected to be on the tidal wave when I sat down). Anyhoot, so you jump on that, and its a 30 Degree hill this little tram thing climbs and you go up this mountain, going away from all the houses and hustle and bustle of Rio. Steadily you get into rainforest which encases the entire bottom of the mountain which the statue is on. As you go up the mountain hoewever it has stops! One called Englishman's hill, which aside from the sign with the name, is literally a slab on concrete in the middle of a forest, random! But as we went up you steadily go through this forest and all of a sudden there will be houses! no road leading to them, just this tram going past. You also get the kids that jump on the side of the tram for a free ride, (like on the trains in India) and then they jump off as its oing full pelt, rather them than me with a shear drop into jungle if they let go!

When you get to the top you climb a few stairs (don't worry, there are lifts an escalators for the Americans) and you are facing the backside of Jesus, Dave promptly took a photo of this.
Unfortunately he is covered in scaffolding at the moment, but the views from up there are pretty spectacular. Although we found it was quite hazy, but this only happens before heavy thunderstorms as there was that evening. But it would be a fantastic view on a clear day, and a very different view to the ones you get from the sugar loaf mountain.

Ok so next day is our departure (we finally have a room to ourselves yay!) So we book our taxi for 7am as our flight is due out at 9, and we double check our reservations online. This all goes fine, the taxi is early we get to the airport and its........ deserted. Not a soul. So we wander over to the LAN desk and ask errr wheres check in for our flight. To which we are told that due to the earthquake in Chile (we change there for Lima, Peru) our flight was cancelled. Apparently they tried to contact us, not via the preferred method i.e email or even the online booking system that we checked the night before which said the flight was confirmed no they rang Devon when we had flown out to Rio. Genius.

So we book onto the next flight at 2.30 which means we will miss our connection, so that too gets pushed back till the following day, and they promise to provide us with a hotel when we get to Santiago as we are one world customers (Being part of a group of the best airlines in the world I think helped us there). So we wait, and naturally our flight is delayed, and as we watch the boards they seem to cancel flights out of hand, one min they will be there the next they are canceled.

When we get to Santiago we have a nightmare with immigration, as naturally we are suppose to be transfers but are actually having to stay the night, then we finally find a LAN person, who cant be bothered to help us as he gets off his shift in 10 mins. Luckily the next people are more helpful and offer to take us to the people who can get us a room. (this is about 10pm now) so we go through customs, who dont like the look of something in my bag and this big ugly geezer demands we open it up (it was a slow night, we were the last people in the airport and he was bored) so I open it up and he rifles through my undies which i snatch off him saying I dont think there is food or liquid in there! and after pulling apart all my stuff which was neatly packed he decides I was right and stomps off.

So then we get dragged outside through the airport whcih only half of has electricity or even a roof! (our flight was sllightly delayed landing also because they had a power cut). We go into a tent, through another tent and realize this is departures and Check in! we finally find someone who takes us to another bloke who thank god, books us a room in a hotel in Santiago. We sort out transfers for the morning, our paperwork said the flight was at 6.50 theirs said 7.50 but we still asked for the transfer to be at 5am to be on the safe side. (11pm by now) we hop on a taxi courtesy of Lan and get to the Crown Plaza Hotel!!! they booked us into a 5* hotel!!!!(there must have been a mistake or something, but we didnt say a word!) Its almost 12am by now, we have to be up at 4.30 for our transfer, but we did enjoy the room, that bed was HUGE!!! and had a wicked view of the whole city! So we slept for 4.5 hours, and got our taxi in the morning, which was delayed leaving because he was using his taxi to push another taxi to jump start it, (just what you need at 5am) rushed through the airport to find our flight was actually at 7.50 but by the time we got through the tent check in, the immigration desks and the scanners (only two working for the whole airport so you can imagine the que) we got through in time for boarding.
Aside from the nightmare we had, I have to say the organisation in Santiago was amazing, the carpark was now basically a departures and check in terminal, and the bridges which had sustained damage were temporarily fixed using all sorts of methods so they were passable. For a city whose airport is almost all off limits due to earthquake damage, they have done very well indeed, i dread to think of the state heathrow would be in if it sustained that much damage!!!

Anyway we finally got to Lima, and I now sit at the comp in the hotel, which is quite a a quirkly little place. We went for a walk, and they have a really good shopping mall overlooking the cliffs and the beach below, nice use of surroundings in architecture there!

Right, that's my rant for the day, My body clock is all messed up afetr lack of sleep and different timezones, so I am in desperate need of sleep.
C ya!!!