“Your not on that flight!” said the man over the ticket booking line. I held my breath as I paused to think what this meant. We were on the way to London Heathrow airport, when we’d check the internet to see which terminal our flight departed from. No results came up, so now we were on the phone to the ticket company.
The LAN flight had been cancelled since we left. “Your on a flight to Madrid 1.5 hours earlier said the man.” I looked at my watch; this was going to be close. On our arrival at the check in desk, the man looked bemused. He turned the screen to show us that our names were down, but with no information as to how we were flying! Thankfully he had quite a jolly zen calm vibe going on, which relaxed us slightly. A couple of hours later we were relieved to be on a flight to Madrid, which all being well, should lead to an arrival in Santiago in time for our internal flight.
This relief didn’t last long, as we realised we would be landing almost 2 hours late for our connecting flight to Sau Paulo. We hit the ground running, discovering first that the LAN check in desk was closed, before finding a LAN flight for Santiago already in boarding. In the end a nice women behind the desk produced 2 hand drawn boarding passes! but said it was unlikely our bags would make the same flight.
We couldn’t believe our eyes 15 hours later when our bags started to appear on the carrousel. It felt too good to be true…… and it was. Our final bag didn’t appear.
We arrived in Coyhaique, Chile on time, via the roughest descent I’ve ever experienced, complete with our 3rd team member Andy Reeve. Calls from our quaint little hostel over the past two days, produced no word of the missing bag. We spent time calculating the rope and climbing gear that would be required to replace the missing kit and it is a lot, also being very difficult to source. We have passed the time with standard holiday activities of lots of eating and lots of shopping (for 3 weeks worth of food and supplies)! We’ve also being discovering the joys of portaledges. One can only hope that they’re easier to handle when suspended vertically on the side of a cliff!
Our feet are getting very itchy now, but today things have started to look up, with confirmation that the bag has reached Santiago and may even make it to Coyhaique this evening all being well. This may just time perfectly now that we know Pascual is on his way to pick us up from 4 hours South in Porto Guadal. He also holds the boat with which to cross Lago General Carrera in order to reach the Avellano Valley and communication means with which to reach the farmers at the start of the valley, whom we hope will provide horses for our huge bags to the base of the wall. On top of all this, the forecast currently looks pretty good.
We all can’t wait to get up there in the mountains! Fingers crossed things may go a little more smoothly.
crookclimbing 