March 31: Day 8. We have an early start to our day not knowing that the day would turn out to be truly hellish and perhaps the worst day we had ever experienced on a tour. We are up at 0300 hrs. with bags out at 0400. Our early departure is to catch a flight back to Lima with a connecting flight to Guayaquil, Ecuador, where we will spend the night before flying to the Galapagos Islands and embark on our ship for a 7–day cruise of the islands. We have breakfast, board our bus, ride to the Cusco airport, and lug our bags into the airport lobby while gasping our last few breaths of the thin air. The flight from Cusco to Lima was unremarkable. We get to the gate for our connecting flight to Guayaquil and wait. It’s getting close to when we should be boarding, but there is no plane at the gate. An announcement is made that we have a last-minute gate change with our new gate at a lower level (meaning we will be boarding using air stairs). We wait some more. And some more. It’s becoming obvious that our flight is seriously delayed. Our tour director, Marcos, is working the ticket counter when the announcement is made that our flight has been canceled. The plane has some major issue that can’t be worked out. We will have to get to Guayaquil on a later flight, but with a group of 20 there are no guarantees that seats will be available.
Around 1100, Marcos asked for volunteers to fly to Guayaquil via Panama, while the remaining group would get there via Quito. Around noon he reappears with the news that the plan fell through. He gathers our group and explains the situation to us. Since he will have to spend time working things out with the airline, he gives us food vouchers that are good in the airport’s food court so we can have lunch. The food court offers a number of dining options, but our vouchers are only good at Burger King, KFC, and a pizza place that is offering up some of the tiniest individual pizzas we have ever seen. KFC is also ruled out because of the long line waiting to get chicken (in fact, almost every Peruvian eating in the food court is feasting on fried chicken and we had noticed that KFC must be the preferred fast food fare due to the ubiquitous outlets we had seen throughout the city). That left us ordering Burger King.
We finished our meal and gathered with other members of our group to wait for news of our flight. Bored to tears, we wait until around 1700 when Marcos appears and announces that we won’t be able to fly tonight and will have to spend the night in Lima. We have been booked on an early flight to Quito tomorrow with a connecting flight to Guayaquil. The main problem centers around getting to Guayaquil in time to board the ship before it sails. If we miss the sailing, we will miss 3 days of the cruise until the ship arrives at an island that will accommodate embarkation. It’s been a long day and everyone is starting to show irritation at the wait time and situation.
Marcos has arranged for a bus to take us to our hotel for the night, and we are forewarned that the hotel is not in the same class as those in which we have been staying. Once again we have a 100-yard trek to the parking lot to board the bus and our luggage is not getting any easier to handle. But at least it’s not at altitude! We leave the airport, which is on the northern outskirts of Lima, and ride completely through the city to its southern outskirts and our hotel. The nearly 1-hour bus ride and the mediocre accommodations of our hotel start to get a few tempers boiling. We are served a nondescript meal and told that we have a red-eye flight to Quito, so there will be another early start tomorrow. A lot of campers are not happy, but it is what it is.
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