Hola Santiago, Chile!

- January 31, 2022

We flew past some big, brown mountains on our way into Santiago

I'm a little bit bemused that we have made it to 1222 Regimiento Cazadores (I know that off by heart having written it on so many forms), our very comfortable apartment in Santiago. I really thought that the odds were stacked against us and that we would fall at any one of the many hurdles.

Air travel is an extraordinary thing. Whichever way you look at it, it is bonkers. Just decades ago our journey would have taken weeks instead of hours. The very idea of building an aluminium cylinder attached to two jet engines, filling it with live humans, and jettisoning it 10 kilometres up into the sky is preposterous. And then there is the netherworld of airports, the pick-a-mix of nutrionless food, the curious mass of humanity, the consumption, the waste. But above all now, aviation is a symbol of human-caused climate devastation. Even more symbolic given that only around 10% of the world's population has ever taken a flight, and some 50% of emissions are caused by 1% of frequent flyers. Inequality, climate change, and climate justice all wrapped up in one beautiful emblem of human ingenuity, the jetliner. It's hard to make sense of it all, and yet we keep going back for more.

Packed and ready to go again

At -26C it was too cold for proper goodbyes outside

And more. We left the Alsen-Clarke residence at 9am for our 12pm flight, got lucky with getting onto the earlier delayed 10am and flew from Ottawa all the way to Toronto. A short distance but a big step. I have been so stressed and tense for the two weeks since we bought our tickets, and by the time we went to the airport we were still short a Chile Mobilty Pass for Felicity, my attestation said there was a problem with my vaccines, we had no onward travel from Chile, and to off-set all those shortcomings we had nothing but a shaky verbal assurance from the receptionist at the Chilean embassy in Ottawa that it would all be ok. But it was all ok.

Saying au revoir to Canada as we take off from Toronto

Toronto to Houston was unremarkable but then the fun started. We boarded our civilised 8.30pm overnight flight to Santiago without too much fuss after eating the world's biggest baked potato (this is Texas y'all). Then we did that thing where you push back from the gate, wait, hear the pilot say there is a minor technical glitch with an engine which will cause "a few moments delay". A little while later we're heading back to the gate so the maintenance guys can come have a look. Then we're pushing back again and now it's groundhog day. The warning light has come on again (I assume it's just like the one that tells you that you are low on windscreen wiper fluid) and someone has decided to put the plane in the hanger to sort it out. No problem we have another plane for you. Please get off and walk to another terminal. Sometime later (the timeline gets blurry) we are sent to a different gate, and some further time later we get on another plane and take off, four-and-a-half hours late, some six hours after the kids' bedtime. Now dinner is at 3am instead of 10pm and we are oh so tired.

It's really hard to capture the scale of this vast potato

The rest of the flight is without incident. We land, we queue for one hour to get our covid documents checked, which takes half and hour, but gets the glitches out of our paperwork which is a big win for future freedom in Chile. Now line up for another 45 minutes to get the covid test done. Then there's a big queue for immigration, another online declaration form thingy to say you aren't importing fruit and meat, and finally baggage reclaim. Our bags are nowhere to be seen and no one knows anything. My handy United app tells me they were delivered to carousel one and I will later find an email buried in all the covid and airbnb notifications telling me that they have been taken upstairs to an office. We finally find them, do an Uber across town (once we found Ricardo on the second floor of Expreso Parking 2), and arrive in soft evening sunshine at our beautiful apartment building where we confirm that we can use the pool before bed.

Covid document screening desk. That blue folder has shepherded me through a couple of decades of travel.

We collapsed into this apartment.

Happiness is horizontal.

Dinner, imported.

34 hours door-to-door, approximately 2 hours of broken sleep. Perhaps all these tribulations serving to remind us that we have travelled halfway around the world to a different continent in a different hemisphere of our at once vast and diverse, yet increasingly homogenised, wondrous planet. Felicity made the most incisive and succint observation of the day: "At least we didn't crash into the ocean". This is true and frankly miraculous. Put in that context we had the best day of our lives!