Jan 21/22 Getting There

We had an uneventful trip to the Boston Airport and the flight to Miami left on time.   Nancy and I had aisle seats across from each other, and no one sitting next to us in the middle seats.   At Miami we walked around a little bit before our next flight.   The floor of the Miami airport has great brass inlays (photo), and fish sculptures on the walls (photos).    

Our flight from Miami actually left a few minutes early, about 11:45pm, which was fortunate, as it had to go a little further then it’s normal route to avoid an active volcano in Ecuador. The plane was not full so Nancy moved over to the empty three seat center section and I had the two seat side section.  Nancy was able to stretch out across the three seats and slept fairly well,  We arrived in Santiago, Chile on time at 10:10am.   Trivia – South America, even the west coast of South America is east of the East Coast of the US, so Santiago is two hours ahead of Boston.  Attached is a photo of the Andes from the plane.

It was the battle of the lines once we reached Santiago.  First we had to get in line to pay a reciprocal fee (while there is no formal VISA, they charge citizens from countries that require Chilean citizens to pay for a VISA the same amount that their citizens pay).   Then we had to get into a long snaky line to go through immigration. We felt like we were waiting for a ride at Disney. Then we picked up our bags and had to get in line to go through customs.   Once through there were Oceania staff to help direct us to a waiting bus for the 1 1/2 hr. ride to Valpariso, a large and bustling seaport.

We were on the boat and checked in by 1:30pm.    Unfortunately we have learned they cancelled a couple of the tours we wanted to take during the cruise, including the zip line, but are working on alternatives.

For those of you with too much time on your hands, you can find where our ship was docked by entering this into Google Earth:

S33 02.269 W71 37.517  

Time for the lifeboat drill, cheers!