The Flight

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Well well, we got to the Hotel 24 hours after leaving Auckland Airport on Thursday (somehow it was only 9pm here and we had left at 5pm... who knows!) - an extremely long 24 hours considering we couldn't really sleep on the first plane (11 hour flight to Santiago, Chile) and then after spending a couple of hours wandering around Santiago airport we jumped on another plane bound for Quito, Ecuador (via Ecuador's largest city, Guyaquil) - a 7 hour journey! We promised not to sleep on this flight (even though it was about 3am NZ time if I remember) and we were absolutely knackered and struggling to keep our eyes open - the idea was that we would be tired enough to sleep through the night in Quito so we could straight away be adjusted to Ecuadorian time.A lot happened along the way - Bryce made a new friend on the plane from Auckland to Santiago...

Anthony made friends with an ex-war vet whose son was flying the plane - unfortunately we didn't get a photo with him because he got moved up to first class (pfft!).
When landed in Chile we were a bit taken back when we saw a huge mountain right next to us. Took a photo (unfortunately it was a little bit hazy which made it hard to see, but it was quite pretty!).

When we got onto the second plane, we were a bit gutted to find out that there was NO TV's in the back of the seats! It was a long journey without being able to check out the in flight entertainment - especially how tired we were, playing games would have been something that could keep us awake! There were a couple of times people started to nod off to sleep and we even got a photo of Bryce just after he passed out - he wouldn't let us put it up though (fair enough, looked terrible!).

Bryce and I (right at the back of the plane) were lucky enough to have a rockstar sitting next to us. It was pretty cool to get some insight and wisdom from him (joke). Here's a photo of him (I hope he isn't watching this blog...)


Made it to Quito (finally) and Customs at the airport has a good system - every time one of the customs officers is free, they press a button and it tells the passengers which one is free so it works fastest. HOWEVER, they decided to connect this button to a terrible loud beeping noise - everytime one of the ten officers were free we got to hear it again (after 20 hours, it wasn't nice!). Thanks Quito Airport for the headache! Here's Paul and Michael waiting in line...


Thanks for reading if you've made it this far... more soon about our first day in Ecuador!
Cheers,

Paulo, Fernando, Alejandro, Antonio and Miguel
(Paul, Bryce, Lance, Anthony and Michael)