9 days, 4 flights, 8 flight cancellations. How to return from Chile to Belgium during a global pandemic. Certainly not recommended for the faint of heart.
Our last stop in Chile was the Atacama desert. But it was while we were having a merry old time watching llamas prancing about and flamingos dancing around that the Coronavirus pandemic brought things toppling down. For some added dramatic effect I wrote about it in diary style. It’s a post without too many photos. The camera hasn’t left the bag for the last few days. It’s also a long post, but it kept me amused, and you got time, right?
Sunday 15th March
We’ve had a great day out and have returned to our little holiday cottage near San Pedro where we stick the Chilean news 24 channel on. Things are starting to sound a bit tense. We gather that the Argentine government is in crisis talks and an announcement is imminent. When it comes, it’s worse than we thought. Argentine land borders will close on Monday. So I guess we’re not going to Argentina on Wednesday, then. Time to get the book out and start looking at other options. It’s not so easy to get to Bolivia, but we could go straight into Peru, and Bolivia was always a question mark because of the political situation, so if we miss it, it’s not like that wasn’t a possibility. We decide to head for Peru. We also think that we shouldn’t wait till Wednesday. If South American countries are looking to each other then maybe by Wednesday the border there will be closed too. So we pack frantically. We were in the cottage for a week so we (well, I) have scattered my belongings all over the place. It takes us a while to get everything together but we go to bed with a cunning plan to throw the last two nights of the holiday cottage, take the hire car back a day early in the morning and just start heading for the border.
Monday 16th March
We wake up and see on the news that Peru has also closed its land border with immediate effect. For 15 days at least. Damn. Time to unpack again then. We spend the entire morning making lists of options and basically test driving them all. We could just kill two weeks in northern Chile. But we’re pretty sure it won’t just be 2 weeks. And do we really want to spend months (and months of our budget) just sitting around not being able to do much? Meanwhile the Belgian government is advising all nationals and residents to return because if we don’t there might not be any flights anymore. Ever. Really?! Aren’t we all overreacting a bit? We could still go to Bolivia. But if we get stuck there then it’s an unpredictable country at the best of times, and what about healthcare if we get the lurgy? We could rent a cheap apartment by the Chilean coast and sit it out, you know – have an actual holiday. We could go to Cuba! This was the wildcard but it didn’t stay on the table long – you need to have a visa and Cuba has stopped issuing them online. We could go home. No way! At this point I’m 100% sure that I do not want to (and we do not need to) go home. But we whittle it down to two options – apartment by the coast and sit it out, or go home. Now I’m 50/50.
Deciding that we’re not ready to make the choice, we leave the cottage to run into town (we need to confirm our stargazing tour for tonight). The car doesn’t start. We don’t have time for this. We walk 30 minutes into town where I go one way to book the tickets and Kim goes the other way to explain that we have a problem to the car hire people (well we have 2 big problems right now but they’re probably only interested in the car one). The nice but slightly useless lady tells us to call a number, so we head back to the cottage. We decide to give pushing the car along the lane, and back, a try. Three tries. It still won’t start. Kim phones the number and after being hung up on 3 times, we manage to get someone to come out to fix it, but it’ll take another 2 hours. So we wait. At least this has been a distraction from the news.
It’s probably nothing to do with the car but I’m now 90% convinced we should go home. There’s a niggling feeling that if we decide to stay and this thing drags on for months, and there are no flights anymore to take us home, we might regret not leaving when we had the chance. We’ll just sit and waste money in a not-that-cheap country. Someone comes and charges the battery of the car, then tells us we need to keep it running for 40 minutes. And that he doesn’t know if it’ll happen again. Mhmm. Just in the nick of time we head off for our stargazing. Good, but not as good as in the Elqui Valley, and just hard to concentrate really.
When we get back (at midnight) we’ve made our decision. We can’t see any way forward other than to return home. We have to get it into perspective – we’ve had a really great 2 months, these countries aren’t disappearing (well, things feel a bit different later in the week), we’re not so old we can’t travel again, and we haven’t had to put up with 2 months of European drizzle followed swiftly by a hefty downpour of quarantining. It could be worse. We shelve the disappointment that our trip is over until we get home, and rebook our flights. Now, because our return flight was in July, we don’t get the ‘special Coronavirus offer’ of free changes. So if we want to fly back from Santiago on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday it’ll cost us 2000 euros each plus 290 euros fee. On Friday there’s no cost, just the fee. There’s no need to panic – you wouldn’t even notice anything is wrong here, so we’ll go with Friday. We’ll have to fly first to Sao Paolo with GOL (who??) then onto Amsterdam with KLM, arriving Saturday morning. We book it, mark the moment with a minute of silence, and go to bed.
Tuesday 17th March
First things first – we need a flight to Santiago, or it’s a 20-hour bus journey. So we manage to bag ourselves a Thursday evening flight for around 100 euros each to arrive in Santiago with plenty of time to spare before our flight to Sao Paolo in the early hours of Friday morning. We check the KLM app, just because. Our flight from Sao Paolo to Amsterdam has been cancelled. No push notification then? Ok, noted for later. We log into the My Trips thingy and start trying to rebook. There’s only one other option which is to go from Santiago to Paris with Air France and then onto Amsterdam with KLM, arriving Saturday night. We’re about to click rebook when the system boots us out and there’s no longer a way to continue. We have to wait for KLM to contact us. So this time yesterday I didn’t want to go home; now I’m worried we can’t. We keep checking the app and about an hour later we’ve been booked onto exactly the route we were looking at. Fine. Good. Sorted.
We decide that we have had enough of being out in the sticks and that we’d like to be in town instead tonight. And we also now need an extra night’s accommodation (Wednesday) as we don’t fly till Thursday. So we double book Tuesday night, upgrade to a nice lodge in the town, pack up (again) and have an eclectic brunch of whatever was in the fridge. We put our stuff in the car and turn the key. It doesn’t start again. Right, patience really wearing thin now. We push it again, and this time it works. We’re supposed to go and fill up the petrol but if we do that we have to turn off the ignition so we go straight to the car hire place and verbally throw the keys in their face. They let us off without filling it up. The lodge we’ve booked is right next door so we check in, dump our bags, get lunch in town (where there’s only one conversation topic at all the tables around us) then walk to the bus station to buy a ticket for Thursday to get the 1.5-hour bus ride from San Pedro direct to Calama airport for our flight to Santiago. We don’t want to risk missing this bus. Chile has now closed their schools so there’s a lot of kids about, getting under their feet in their parents’ shops and tour agencies.
Back at the hotel, we chill by the llamas. As you do. As we noticed that we weren’t getting notifications from the airlines, we decide to regularly check both the KLM and LATAM apps. At the 5pm check I notice that our LATAM flight from Calama to Santiago has been changed to a later one. Then Kim gets an email to say it’s been cancelled and we need to rebook. Relaxation over, back to our rooms, laptop out. We click through and choose the flight we want (we’d rather leave earlier than later) but then we have to chat to an online agent to get it confirmed. We join an online chat queue in position 319. That’s a lot of people, but it might go fast. It does go fast. Cool, we’ll be done here in time for dinner. We use the clock and the queue counter to make projections about when it’ll be our turn. We stare at the counter. The chat window musn’t be touched for fear of closing it accidentally. At the same time we have another tab open to check how booked up the flights for Thursday are getting. If we see them disappear we’re getting on a bus to Santiago in the morning. I do a victory dance when we get into the top 100. It’s now nearly 8pm. The counter is going slower. At 9pm we decide that Kim should run out to a takeaway pizza place otherwise we’re not going to eat tonight. I keep the counter alive. We get into the top 10. We’re both finding it hard to keep looking at the screen. Kim falls asleep. I prod him. At 1am we are at the front of the queue!! Julian takes care of us and we rebook onto another flight. I refresh the app. No baggage is included Julian! We might be tired but we’re still on the ball. Julian fixes it. We thank him, and hit the sleep button – on the laptop and us.
Wednesday 18th March
The alarm goes click. Instead of ‘I got you babe’ I hear a familiar voice in my head: ‘time to check the UK news, Belgian news, Chilean news, Brazilian news, French news, Dutch news followed by the two airline apps and all airport website departure boards’. This seems to have become a new morning routine. I check the Calama airport website departure board and notice that a lot of flights for today have been cancelled. I start to get worried. LATAM are going to cancel our flight again and we’re not able to jump on a flight immediately because we’re still an hour and a half away. We go and get breakfast (real coffee! Something is going right!)
At breakfast we meet two Brits who just made it into Chile from Bolivia before the border closed today. They’re due to fly to Australia in 2 weeks. They’re mentally 2 days behind us. They still think they’re going. I say to Kim we need to get to Calama airport sooner rather than later even if it means no refund for tonight’s accommodation. We make the assumption that Calama airport is in the middle of nowhere. It kind of is but it turns out there’s an airport hotel with a room going for 50 odd euros. So we decide to leave for Calama airport today. The lodge has a few other couples in it, all doing the same thing. Luckily there’s lots of shady outdoor ‘desk space’ for laptops, books, phones, tablets and paper and pens. The Germans are trying to get to New Zealand but their insurance will be void. The Italians are in a bad way. Head in hands and a lot of ‘vaffanculo’-ing down the phone going on. I walk past a room and hear a girl wailing in tears.
I go to the front desk to explain that we will leave early. With sad eyes the lady tells me that they just got a mail to say all the national parks in Chile are now closed. She tries to do a refund for tonight. I tell her to leave it. The lodge is practically empty. We pack up and have a last chat with the Brits. I’ve slipped into a coaching role: asking open questions, playing devil’s advocate. They still don’t want to admit their trip is over. We walk through town. A lot of tour agencies and shops are now closed. There’s a sign on the pharmacy door saying they don’t have any masks or antibacterial gel. People around us are starting to wear masks. It’s a totally different place from yesterday and a parallel universe from Monday. We get some lunch then head to the bus station early to allow enough time to see if we can change our bus ticket. Yesterday there was a queue. We want to be at the front of it. The office is closed. Reopening 15 minutes before the bus departure time. Sigh. All the other agencies that do crossings into Bolivia are closed until further notice. The office opens and they swap our ticket no extra cost. 16 euros saved! We get on the bus and my stomach relaxes for the first time in days. Kim takes some last pictures of the Andes. We book the airport hotel. An hour and a half later we’re at the airport and do a quick recce for tomorrow. Flights are leaving. People are there. Masks are increasing in number. Five minutes in a cab later and we’re at our hotel where we get asked for a ‘I don’t have it’ Coronavirus certificate. A what? Kim twigs that this must be what Europeans are being issued with. We explain we’ve been in Chile for a month and they forget all about it.
We get on the wifi and head out to the pool with our complimentary pisco sour welcome drink. Well, we may as well relax a bit. When it starts to get cool we head in and change for dinner. Then Kim gets a mail to say that our Santiago to Paris flight with KLM has been changed to depart at the same time from Buenos Aires. That’s in Argentina no? Is this a mistake or did someone not pay attention in geography class? Or are the airline staff so exhausted they’re getting desperate? We ping off messages to KLM and take the laptop down with us to the restaurant. There’s no buffet or a la carte tonight. Just a menu del dia with 2 options for each course. We order one of each and 2 large glasses of carmenere. The waitress asks if everything is ‘todo bien’. Not really, we say, and tell her we’re facing 3 months in Chile as Pinera has declared a state of emergency for 90 days. She says with a smile that we can spend a lot of time in the pool.
We consider doing shifts on the laptop through the night but decide it’s not worth it. We both go to bed. I now think that there’s a slim chance we will get back home in the next 3 months. I’m losing the energy to keep coming up with alternatives. At least our flight to Santiago is still scheduled.
Thursday 19th March
Day 4 in the Big Corona House. We’ve slept really badly. No response from KLM and no new flight in the app. We make it down to breakfast where the guests are dwindling fast. Just us and two others left now. They sort of cobble together a sandwich for us. It’s kind of them but this hotel really shouldn’t still be operational. There are more staff than guests.
We decide to just get going to the airport – maybe they can move us onto an earlier flight. We ask the receptionist to call us a cab. She calls one company, no answer. She calls someone else and has to ask ‘are you working?’ 5 mins later we’re at the airport where we bump into the Brits. They were told by Quantas that they wouldn’t make it to Australia so now they’re doing the same as us – getting to Santiago as fast as possible to see what the options are. Somehow they’re on an earlier flight than us.
We ask if there’s any space but it immediately gets a ‘no’. So we stick with our 5pm flight. It’s only 11am but they want us to check in our big bags. So in a hurry we hand them over and get a boarding pass, which seems like a fair exchange. We then get chatting to two bike tourists (a Swiss guy and a British guy) who have shown up without a flight ticket and got turned away. They end up cycling to the bus station in Calama to take the 20-hour bus to Santiago. They have tents and supplies so if they get stuck at least they can camp out in the desert. They might be the last humans alive at the end of this, we joke. We wish each other fuerte then we pace about for 3 hours. At lunchtime we force down a bit of pizza. This airport is the quietest and saddest I’ve ever seen. It’s like someone everybody knows has died. Nobody is talking. Everyone is suspicious of everyone. People keep sidestepping each other. Nobody shares a bench, everyone is tucking themselves away in the furthest corner they can find. We see an eclectic mix of head gear now – why wear a paper mask when you can use a scarf/sarong/gas mask/welding visor etc etc? It’s like everyone raided their garages: ‘I knew this would come in handy one day!’ Gloves have appeared too. Mainly plastic ones. In the bathrooms I’ve never seen people wash their hands with such theatre before.
We go through security where we’re asked to maintain a one metre distance from other people. In the rush to get rid of our big bags Kim realises he left his pen knife in his hand luggage, but it makes it through… We finally board and there’s not a spare seat going. The LATAM air stewards (also masked and gloved) don’t seem very keen to help passengers find space in the overhead lockers. Maybe they have been told not to touch too many things. Or maybe their salaries are about to be cut in half (we found that out later today). A Chilean guy and I end up helping others find space for their bags. The first 20 minutes of the flight is not as ‘tranquilo’ as the pilot indicated. We rock left and right with the wind and the mountain ascent. But after that it’s ok and we land a little later than scheduled into Santiago. A huge sigh of relief. One step down.
In Santiago airport it’s a totally different feel. It’s like there’s a buzz. Maybe it’s just adrenaline. Maybe it’s capital city bravado. And we’re not sure if they always do this but they’re blasting music out all over the airport. We arrive to ‘The Power of Love’ which makes the whole thing just feel like that annual mad dash to get home for Christmas. We go straight to the Star Alliance desk which looks like this:
The only airline with some staff at is LATAM but there’s also a crowd of tired customers waiting patiently with their numbered ticket in hand. We decide it’s worth checking out LATAM connections online tonight and having a day out at the airport tomorrow. But for tonight we find our airport hotel shuttle and get going. Tonight we’re well and truly cracking into our ‘if the unthinkable happens’ pot of cash and staying at the nicest place we’ve been in so far. They have put up alcoholic gel dispensers all over the place. I never thought this would be a way to set a hotel apart from its competition. At dinner there are at least more guests than last night. Again, everyone is having the same conversation. I consider standing up and suggesting that we just troubleshoot this thing together. I’ll even organise breakout sessions if I really have to. The waiter asks us to use the dispensers after he hands us our bill, because ‘I am the virus!’ he squeals with a strange glint in his eye. This thing is really messing people up…
On the news we see that Pinera has rescheduled the referendum and is using the empty streets as an opportune moment to wash away all the political graffiti in the city parks. That is not going to go down well with the folks here…Back in the room we find more 6000 euro flights with LATAM departing tomorrow, but we also find a 1500 flight (with free cancellation) departing on Saturday. Too good to be true right? Right. This just about fits onto a credit card so we decide to book it. But after filling in all the info and confirming payment it tells us it’s no longer available. A few refreshes later the flight reappears but it’s now 2600 each, over the credit card limit.
We send another message to KLM reminding them that according to their app we are supposed to be on a flight to Sao Paulo in 6 hours time. We won’t be on it without an onward connection. We’ll probably hear it fly over us as we sleep with one eye open again.
Friday 20th March
I’ve slept really badly, but finally get a solid 1.5 hours in at 7am. When I wake up, Kim is already awake. We’ve been rebooked by KLM. Onto another Santiago-Paris-Amsterdam route. Massive sigh of relief. Leaving today? No, on Tuesday. Tuesday…as in not today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow or the day after that, but the day after that? 4 days in airport hotels? We’re still happy to have something, but there must be another way. And what happens if they cancel again? How long will this go on for? We think about it over breakfast. Yesterday we also found a LATAM route with a free cancellation for 1500 euros each, leaving Tuesday night too. We’d dismissed it because Tuesday seemed like a long time away, but now it might be a good back-up plan. If we book that and we don’t need it, we can cancel it for free. But if KLM bumps us again, we can go on that flight. So we go back to the room resolving to do that.
Then we enter a couple of hours of what I like to call the ‘swat the flight’ game. It’s a bit like swatting flies. The fly appears. You can see it on the other side of the room. You make a calm but steady approach towards it, gradually raising your hand as you go. You slam your hand down and it’s gone. You don’t see it for a good 5 minutes, until you spot it again, but it’s somewhere else this time. Laptop open, we spot a good flight connection, we carefully but swiftly fill in all the passenger info, then when we’re ready to strike we hit the ‘book’ button. And it’s gone. Page says the flight isn’t available anymore. We do another search and find the same 1500 deal (I can’t believe I’m calling 1500 euros a ‘deal’!) but to another destination, then the whole flight swatting game starts again. We look at Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Madrid, Frankfurt, Dusseldorf, London even… At one point I see that there’s still availability in a Madrid airport hotel on Monday night (we thought they were closed). It has a free cancellation so I grab it. I’ve no idea whether it helps us but it feels like something has been achieved. At the point where we need to leave our room for check-out we give up and conclude that we’ll have to go to the airport. We’ve both had enough. When we check out, all the plush-looking sofas and carpet from the reception area are being removed. I guess hotels are taking this opportunity to get their annual maintenance in.
As we are still pinning hopes on leaving before Tuesday, and hotels here aren’t booked up, we’re booking one night at a time – a tour of the airport hotels, if you will. Tonight’s hotel is a good bit cheaper but just across the road so we take our bags and check in there. At the reception we bump into the San Pedro/Calama airport British couple again who have managed to get themselves on a flight to Manchester leaving the next day. They tell us that they went to the LATAM desk at the airport yesterday, took a ticket, waited 3 hours, and then got this for under 1000 euros. They stayed in the hotel last night and are heading into downtown Santiago now to escape the cabin fever.
When we get to our room, we start searching the Manchester connection. We have friends with a spare room up there. But we can’t find anything. We conclude that getting to Madrid seems to be the first hurdle and somehow we’ll find a way back from Madrid, even if it’s on a repatriation flight. Kim messages the Belgian Foreign Office again (we became virtually acquainted 4 days ago) and asks if it would help if we got to Madrid. They immediately reply to say there are no repatriation flights going from Madrid as commercial airlines are still running Madrid to Brussels. To close off our communications they say ‘we duimen ermee!’ (we’re crossing our fingers for you). Nice, but really not what we pay tax for…
In our new hotel room I start a query with LATAM from Santiago to Madrid and I spot a flight (via Sao Paolo) for 600 euros each. We don’t even hestitate. I throw all our info in and hit ‘book’, telling myself that it probably won’t work. But it does and we get a confirmation page. I’ve no idea what I’ve just booked but it feels like we’re getting somewhere. We take some time to check I didn’t misstype something. We still have that night in a Madrid airport hotel. A Spanish friend of ours rings around a couple of the hotels there to check if they will actually be open. They say they will all close on Monday. Our booking is for Monday night. And right on cue I get a message from the hotel cancelling my booking. So we really need a flight out of Madrid on Monday. Back to work. We come up with a London flight with BA but that then leaves us still with a Eurostar connection to pay. It’s a crazy idea, but we decide to look at KLM from Madrid to Amsterdam. There’s a flight leaving on Monday. It’ll cost 200 euros but maybe we can use a refund on the other KLM route to buy this one. We request a refund of our original journey. We get a message to say it’ll take a week to process. We’re not waiting for that. We book the flight anyway. We’ll worry about the money later. I have to get a pen and paper out and write down what we’ve just booked to check that it will actually work. It seems to, and we book a half night in a capsule-type thing in Sao Paolo airport to see if we can get some sleep there. So now we are due to fly out tomorrow night to Sao Paolo, then after a 13-hour layover go onto Madrid with Iberia, arriving early Monday morning. A short wait in Madrid airport and we connect to Amsterdam with KLM. We load the flights into the app so it feels more real. We decide not to cancel our original route with KLM. If our new plan works out we’ll be back home a whole day before we are due to leave Santiago, so we can cancel it when we get to Madrid at least. It takes a while for us to relax and we grab a 3pm lunch at the hotel restaurant. It’s nice to spend the rest of the afternoon not having to think about this anymore.
At dinner we head down to the restaurant and update the Brits on our good news. The restaurant now has to space out diners, so we wait a bit to get a table a metre or so away from other people. They’ve also put the temporary menus in plastic wallets since lunchtime – easier to disinfect. I wasn’t able to nap this afternoon so we round off the day with a pisco on the rocks (the waiter thinks we’re mad – everyone drinks it with cola in Chile), and it does the trick. I sleep solidly for 9 hours.
Saturday 21st March
Enter the boredom phase. Breakfast is the main excitement of the morning and then we sit around in the room until check-out time. If we’re finding this difficult, how are we going to cope if and when we eventually get home?! I’m not sure what’s worse – constant stress or total boredom. At least with the first the hours fly by. We have lunch in the hotel and then spend 5 hours sat on their little sunny terrace out the back. I even manage to squeeze in some proofreading work.
At 6pm it starts to get a little cool (you know, only 20 degrees) so we decide to bite the bullet and get the hotel shuttle to the airport. While we’re waiting in the lobby Kim gets an email from KLM to say that we can’t take the Madrid-Amsterdam flight anymore as the Netherlands have just stopped accepting flights from Spain (apart from for Dutch nationals). So we’ve spent the entire day twiddling our thumbs and at the moment that we need to leave the hotel’s nice wifi, this happens. Our Chilean SIM card has also run out, so as we bundle ourselves into the shuttle we hope that there’s decent wifi at the airport. The flight isn’t until 11pm so we still have hours to sort this out.
We start to think that we should rebook the Sao Paolo connection to a non-Spanish European city. Or we just need another flight out of Madrid on Monday. Flying to Brussels would be the safest option because we would fit into the ‘exception for nationals/residents’ then if other countries were to follow the Netherlands. But there are no flights until Wednesday. 2 nights in an airport without any hotel facilities and maybe no food? Hmm, let’s look for an alternative. We can rebook our KLM flight via them but to go to Paris instead. It should be a free rebook as that’s what we were offered when we booked the flight a couple of days ago. It’s not, though, of course. So another 200 and something euros goes into changing the flight to Paris. We take screenshots to show the ‘no charge’ message right beside the price. We decide to get on with this Sao Paolo flight before anything else happens. At the LATAM check-in desk the guy gives us a bit of a fright. The layover in Brazil is 13 hours which is too long for them to put the bags right through to Madrid, so we will have to clear immigration, collect our bags and then exit Brazil again 13 hours later. But he then starts telling us we need a visa. Unless the rules changed in the last month (totally possible given everything that’s going on), we don’t need a visa. We show him our passport for when we arrived in Brazil 2 months ago and he seems to be OK with it. At the Chilean exit point, we get the wrong stamp in our passport. It says we leave Chile on the 30th March. I really hope that’s not a sign.
But everything goes to plan and we land in Sao Paolo 30 minutes early, at 2.30am. Immigration is a breeze – no questions at all. We go to collect our bags. No bags. We’re the last people waiting at the carousel. Kim goes to ask the lost baggage guy who tells us that the bags will have been put through to Madrid. I really hope pilots communicate better than this. I’m feeling quite smug because I packed my hand luggage with a clean change of clothes and a toothbrush. Kim didn’t. We make our way to our little capsule hotel for the night.
At least the second half of today cleared one question up for me – I’ll take the boredom over the stress, thanks.
Sunday 22nd, and Monday 23rd March?
I think this is two days. I lose track somewhere. I wake up in our capsule and actually I’ve slept pretty well. 6 hours straight. Needed the earplugs though as we were right next to the reception desk and people were checking in through the night. And the airport tannoy had a reminder about how to wash your hands (in 3 languages) playing at 5-minute intervals. If you’re Spanish speaking you need to use water and ham. Well, I guess it’s soap but it sounds very similar and it was funny, for a while… After we check out we decide we need 10 minutes sitting in the heat and sun outside as it’ll be a long time before we might see that again. We already have our boarding pass for the Madrid flight so we go straight through to the departure gates section and eat yet another burger (don’t want anymore burgers or pizzas for a while). The flight is ‘previso’ but not yet confirmed. Then it suddenly says ‘go to gate’ but doesn’t say which gate. Our names are called. Here we go….we think. But thankfully it’s just to confirm that we’re actually here and still want to take the flight, otherwise they won’t bother putting our bags through onto it, from wherever they spent their night. The bags may have had their own little capsule hotel.
When we board the plane we notice that a guy sitting a few rows away has the entire flight crew around him. They’re taking his temperature with one of those thermometers you buy in a pharmacy. Then some paramedics get on board and get out a proper thermometer. Then he disappears. Later, when we land in Madrid, we are told we have to stay in our seats for another hour so that Madrid paramedics can take the guy into isolation. Now either this was a rather smart way to get a free upgrade to business class, or the poor guy is now in hospital.
The flight to Madrid is one of on/off turbulence, meaning I don’t eat. I just focus on us landing in one piece and that keeps me amused for 9 hours. We land at 5.40am but it’s just like a very late night for us. No questions asked in Madrid airport. No checks. No tests. But the airport is dead. It’s like they’ve been wanting to shut up shop for several days now, but we’re still browsing. We have to go outside to get a bus to transfer us to another terminal, and in the 30 seconds it takes to get on the bus we get more rained on than the entire 2 months we were away. It’s cold and grey. Everyone on the bus looks like us. Like a really terrible advert for Decathlon. Walking turtles with hurriedly packed rucksacks front and back, hiking shoes, and tans fading fast. All backpackers who either had no return flight, or didn’t book with an agent who would sort them out. Or were just in denial for a few days longer than the average tourist. We swap stories about which countries we did manage to see before reality hit.
In the other terminal we find the KLM/Air France desk where we hurriedly try and drop off our bags so we can go and get a coffee and food. We get told that check-in doesn’t open for 30 minutes. So we wait around with all the other people sleeping on their bags while 6 members of KLM/Air France staff just stand around doing nothing. Tip: you could be replying to customer messages rather than twiddling your thumbs. We get asked if we have an onward connection from Paris, given that we’re not French. We say ‘no’ and one of the ladies rips into me in Spanish. Quite a few people in the queue raise their eyebrows. We’re all tired love. So the KLM/Air France staff leave us waiting for about an hour thinking that we won’t be able to board this flight. That would have been 9 cancelled flights. A final gift of stress from them. We rapidly check the French news to see if we missed something. They’ve put up ropes a metre away from the check-in desks. My arms aren’t long enough so I have to kind of frizbee my passport at the lady. She seems to think we’ll be fine so just hands us boarding passes.
We then go in search of food. Everything is pretty much closed. No duty free, no shops or cafes. The only thing you can get is something from a vending machine and a coffee. People are sleeping in corners of the airport. Even some of the toilets are closed. We’re really happy we have another flight out of here, because the alternative would have been ‘living’ here for several days. At the boarding gate, a police officer with a frozen pizza under his arm, yells at everyone to stay 1 metre apart. On the plane there’s a young German girl sat next to me. It’s painful watching her stay awake. Her head hits the window about 10 times. The air stewards come around with apologies, water and biscuits, but everyone is asleep. Apart from me of course.
At French customs, same as in Madrid. No questions. No checks. No tests. No quarantine. Just a feeling of ‘get out so we can all go home’. The final challenge is to get me into Belgium. Kim’s dad has been around to our house, picked up my proof of residence in Belgium, and collects us at the airport. It’s a 3-hour drive from Paris and the roads are quiet. No police around so we slip back into Belgium without any problems. The bags remain packed. They might stay that way for a while. No rush, though. With Belgium in lockdown, there really is…no rush.
Total costs incurred from the point we left San Pedro: 2890.88 euros, of which 2496.46 euros on flights.
