We are off on another excursion to South America! We left home very, very early on Wednesday morning -- but not quite as early as planned. We had reserved an Uber to the airport at 3:30 a.m., and at 3:10 the Uber app notified us that a driver was on the way. And then he wasn't. For whatever reason, the driver canceled at the last minute. Uber dispatched another driver, who arrived about 10 minutes past our appointed time. But we still arrived at the airport in plenty of time.
Our flight to Miami was right on time. Miami's airport is horrible. We've been through this before. There is no way to get from the domestic terminals to the international terminal without leaving security walking -- literally -- a mile. No tram, no bus. Then there was the long line to get through security once again. Fortunately, we had plenty of time to wait for our Avianca flight to Bogota, Colombia.
That flight was right on time, too. We had great seats on a nice, big Airbus. The plane taxied out toward the runway, and then I noticed that we were heading back toward the terminal. Soon, the pilot announced that there was a problem with the flight computer and that we were returning to the gate. They kept us on the plane for a little over an hour before telling us to gather our stuff and return to the terminal.
Miami is like being in a foreign country. All the announcements are in Spanish first, and sometimes they forget to add the English translation later. My Spanish is at a very elementary level -- I can only pick out words here and there. Mary's is worse. But we got that we were supposed to go to another gate where Avianca would rebook us. The line there was long and very slow.
Finally, we were booked on another flight as far as Bogota, but we had missed our connection to La Paz, Bolivia. Apparently, Avianca only has one flight per day to La Paz, and it's in late evening. They promised us that we could get lodging and meal vouchers in Bogota, but we would be arriving in La Paz a full 24 hours late.
The second plane to Bogota was not nearly as nice as the first. It was an old, stripped down Boeing, much smaller, and now of course, packed to the gills with people, like us, taking the later flight. The seats were hard plastic and did not recline. There was no service -- not even so much as a glass of water -- and nothing for in-flight entertainment. The last was OK, since we generally read anyway.
We arrived in Bogota past 10 p.m., and sure enough, there were people waiting for us with our vouchers for a night (at the Hilton, no less!) plus three meals and cash for transportation. Navigating through immigration was going to be a challenge, as we had not yet completed the proper Covid forms. We weren't planning to be here until next week, and they can't be done until 72 hours prior to arrival. But people at immigration even facilitated that, too, by checking our U.S. Covid vaccination cards.
In all of the moving around and standing in lines, we got acquainted with a Bolivian man who currently lives in Miami. Eugene was on his way to visit relatives in La Paz, and he was most helpful to us in helping navigate the mess. Colombians speak Spanish very fast, and I was having trouble even picking out occasional words. But Eugene was a great translator, and we even shared a taxi to the hotel with him.
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| Just a street in the neighborhood, lots of traffic. |
Our day in Bogota was spent mostly resting and getting used to the altitude, which will only get higher in La Paz. That would have been most of the agenda for the day had we made it to La Paz on time, except that we would have me our tour leader and the rest of the group. We'll catch up with them tomorrow. The weather was gorgeous! We walked around the neighborhood and visited a supermarket. Our hotel room got very hot, so the Hilton moved us down the hall to one that had working A/C. They even extended our stay to 6 p.m. so that we had a place to be until going back to the airport for the evening flight.
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