Sydney--Day 4: On Which We Fly LAN Airlines

The next day was my birthday, September 26, and LAN Airlines was nice enough to call and wish me a happy birthday. Well, sort of. At 6:45 AM, my phone, which I had lashed to the metal bedframe of my bunk bed with my watch, starting vibrating, shaking the whole bed. My tired brain processed the following: (1.) It's too early to be my alarm. (2.) Must be a wrong number. I hit cancel. Then it rang again. This time I processed the following: (1.) It's too early to be my alarm. (2.) I don't recognize that country code. (3.) There's only one possibility.

Sure enough, it was Fabian calling from Chile on behalf of LAN Airlines to let me know that my flight "tomorrow, September 26," would be delayed by two hours. Great. Wide awake now, I headed back to start gathering my things anyways. Then the phone rang once more: it was Fabian again, wanting to let me know that when he said "tomorrow," he really meant "today." "Because we are in different time zones," he explained. Got it.

Even though the plane was delayed, I decided to head to the airport only 15 minutes after I had originally planned to leave. Good move. By the time I got there, a long queue had already formed at the LAN desk. Checking in took forever. With each person, the agents needed to check with a supervisor about something or another, and then process the inevitable mountain of luggage that the passenger was bringing with them. The guy in front of me was upset because the delay of this flight (which would continue to Santiago, Chile, after Auckland) would mean he would miss his connection to Buenos Aires. After two hours I was finally the next to be checked in. It was 9:55 AM--on the original schedule, my plane would have departed. Good thing it was delayed. As I was about to step up to the desk, the agents decided to close down check-in and move it to the opposite counter. This meant another 15 minutes while they slowly gathered their things, logged onto the new computers, and fed boarding passes into the printer. Finally, I got my boarding pass. I asked the agent if they had any departure cards (I was prepared this time!), but was told simply "No."

As I was going through security, an officer grabbed my bag of liquids. "Can I see this, please?" he said, pointing to my toothpaste. I opened the bag. He stared at it like he had no clue what it was. "What IS this?" he asked. Toothpaste. "It's too big. See? 350 grams," he said, pointing to the number, "It's too big." By this point, it was 10:30 AM, and I hadn't eaten anything all day, so I didn't put up much of a fight. "Fine, just take it," I said. After the metal detector, I was again randomly selected for secondary screening. I was told to read a laminated page of incomprehensible justifications for the screening process, an agent rubbed my bag with a wand, put a strip into a machine, and gave me a pat-down. Whatever keeps up safe...

In all honesty, once I got past security and the check-in lines, I had a pleasant experience on LAN. The flight attendants, whose name tags contained a mini-flag of their country of origin (most Chile, one US and one Ecuador), were cordial and efficient. I celebrated my birthday over the Tasman with a glass of orange juice and some sort of Kiwi-made prepackaged apricot fruit cake, as there was no vegetarian meal available. The A340 is a nice plane and gave us a smooth ride to Auckland. LAN certainly wasn't Emirates, but it also wasn't trying to be. We landed in Auckland 1.5 hours later than originally scheduled, and I got a new passport stamp for the occasion.

So that's it! The Sydney travelogue completed. I'll get back to doing a few posts about non-travel-related matters in the coming days/weeks. As I may have mentioned before, I have a full week during my finals period that I'm trying to decide what to do with...maybe another trip somewhere? Stay tuned...