December 21, 2010

I knew the leg from Florianopolis to Villa La Angostura was going to be one of the most inefficient of the entire voyage. I had spent many hours trying to find something more convenient, but there were just too many constraints. Brazil and Argentina both have flight networks centralized around a single city (Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires). The solution was to fly to Sao Paulo (wrong direction), wait 4 1/2 hours, then fly to Buenos Aires and sleep over there. Tomorrow we will then continue to Bariloche and go by car to Villa La Angostura.

We spent the morning packing and getting ready. Laura and her sister, Sonia, came to help us get our luggage to the airport. Ready to go, the apartment we have rented in the background:

And here we are at the airport. We were all very emotional:

The kids are all ready:

I used one of the automatic check-in machines. The user interface was not at all created to make it easy to check in several people. For all 5 of us I had to press a lot of buttons to select country of residence, country of passport and then type in the passport number. At the very end I was told that it was not possible to check us in to our connecting flight in Sao Paulo and that I had to talk to the personell at the check-in counter. Beautiful.

I had bought the ticket online with the airline TAM. The first flight was operated by TAM, but the second, from Sao Paulo to Buenos Aires, was operated by LAN with a TAM code share. At the counter the lady told us that since the flight was operated by LAN they could not check us in. We would have to do that at the LAN desk in Sao Paulo. I had never before experienced that it was not possible to check in when the flight was code-shared. After all we had a TAM ticket. I insisted a couple of times, but the lady was quite certain, so I let it go. She assured us that our luggage would go to Buenos Aires, it was only the seats we needed to get in Sao Paulo.

Our plane was another Airbus A320. Here is Isliene running towards the tarmac. She really loves flying and told me she was happy we couldn´t get a direct flight to Buenos Aires, so she could fly two times today:

Our flight was about an hour delayed, but with 4 1/2 hours in Sao Paulo that wasn´t a problem. Once we arrived I checked the screens for our connecting flight:

Canceled. Lovely. That explained why it was impossible to check in to the flight. Note also that the only other flight to Buenos Aires is with Qatar Airways.

I immediately realized that our luggage now was in a dangerous limbo. It had arrived in Sao Paulo with a luggage tag for a flight which did not exist. Ouch!

Now, who do we speak to, TAM or LAN? We first tried the TAM check-in counter. They sent us t the TAM ticket office. The TAM ticket office sent us to the LAN check-in counter.  At LAN there was a long waiting line, so we got hold of someone who took us aside. This woman seemd to know what she was doing, spoke perfect English and was very service minded. She told us everything was perfectly fine. There was a GOL flight to Buenos Aires leaving at exactly the same time to the same airport in Buenos Aires. They would rebook us and the luggage was being taken care of. Do not worry, just smoke your opium over there and relax, sir.

Update: It was only about a week later that we were to learn that the flight was canceled because of a worker conflict in LAN and a one-day strike. They were probably not very happy that GOL set up an extra flight at the exactly the same time to the same destination.

She took us over to a counter.

They copied down all information from our luggage tags and wrote things on a paper, then a guy took out his mobile phone and spoke for a long time with someone about luggage and read out the numbers from our tags. I was not very reassured.

After about only half an hour we got a hand-written Flight Interruption Manifest.

Then we were told to go over to the GOL ticket office, speak to a guy called Cajo, and exchange our shiny new hand written FIM into a GOL ticket. Then we could go and check in to our GOL flight. We were glad we had enough time.

We were told where the GOL office was but could not find it. Everyone we asked was helpful and turned us in the right direction, but it was not there. We were obviously homing in on it and when I finally asked yet another guy. He spotted my FIM and pointed to his name tag. It said “Cajo.” Cajo worked for LAN and was placed there only to catch LAN passengers and help them exchange their FIMs for tickets. The GOL office was in an office where the door was marked “Passenger lounge!”

Cajo stayed inside for a long time before he came out with our tickets. I mentioned our luggage to him. He reassured me that everything was taken care of.

OK. Now it was time to stand in the long line to check in for the GOL flight. Once we could check in I made sure to ask the person there about the luggage. She seemed to know nothing and asked for a colleague. Before her colleague had time to arrive Cajo appeared like a jack-in.the-box and assured everyone present that LAN had total control of the luggage and had correctly transferred it to GOL and that it would be on the flight. I actually believed everything woukd be fine at this point.

Our flight was about an hour late, which seems to be the standard here. This time we flew in a Boeing 737-800 (stitched photo. Added bonus: Helene two times :-)):

We got some great views of Buenos Aires coming in:

The kids were startng to become pretty tired. it had been a long day, and we were still not at our destination.

Waiting in line for passport control we saw this sign.

It seems to be standard policy in both Brazil and Argentina to charge entry fees from citizens of countries who charge fees for Brazilians and Argentininas respectively. It reminded us of our little incident in Iguassu 15 years ago, when Helene needed a visa to enter Brazil. That was only needed because France demanded visas from Brazilians at the time.

We were a bit nervous at baggage claim, but had high spirits. Time passed and there were fewer and fewer people around us waiting for their luggage. In the end the belt stopped moving, the dreaded sign all travellers fear. There was a small counter over in a corner for registering lost luggage. Two other people had lost luggage and they were of course ahead of us in the line.

People in South America really have a different notion of and relationship to time then we have in Europe. It is not common to plan anything, if you can avoid it. Last time we were here the people we visited in Argentina and Brazil were making fun of us all the time becase we kept asking strange questions like “What should we do during the week?” or “What is the plan for tomorrow?” These were typical gringo questions. Of course we would do whatever we wanted and make it up as we went along. It seems to me that to them it was like us being asked to order what we were going to eat at a restaurant several days before going there.

Also, whenever you are in line to have some kind of paperwork done. it just takes forever. People here seem to accept it and just wait peacefully and chat with the other people in the line. I remember being in a travel agency in Ushuaia 15 years ago. There were 4 people ahead of us and we had to wait 2 hours. Nobody else seemed to think this was out of the ordinary at all.

It took pretty exactly one hour to register the lost luggage of the two people in front of us.  Here I am, waiting in line, trying to act like a South American:

The human psyche is interesting. We are really not made for this modern world. There was a single luggage arrival belt where we were and other flights arrived as we stood in line. Every time the belt started moving my brain told me to keep an eye on the luggage coming out of the hole in the wall, in case our backpacks arrived. Totally meaningless of course.

Once it was our turn I explained the situation. She took my baggage ticket and picked up her mobile phone. She said to the person on the other end of the line that she had another person who had been rebooked from LAN to GOL and that not a single piece of luggage had made it from other parts of Brazil to that flight for those who had been rebooked from LAN. Then she hung up. It almost seemed like she needed to vent and thought I didn´t understand Spanish. During her conversation I leaned slightly over the counter and by chance, and to my horror, discovered that she did not have a computer. She only had a large pile of forms. She was only registering everything on paper forms! This did not bode well for getting our luggage back any time soon.

It of course took a very long time to fill in everything.

She claimed the luggage most probably would arrive early tomorrow morning. Yeah, sure. She also claimed she needed our luggage tags. I insisted on taking photos of them, oherwise we would have no record of having checked in our luggage:

We were completely exhausted when we finally could head for the beds we had reserved close to the airport. I had had my brain continuously on overclocking mode since we figured out the luggage was lost. Still I needed to do a bit of blogging before going to bed. What does one not do for the readers?

Eirik

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