Day/Night 37 - Off to Brazil Again! - April 4, 2013

Today we cleaned up the apartment a little and packed our things.  Good breakfast by K, and our anfitriona (landlady) is came and conducted a thorough inventory, and approved us for checkout with no damages.  !Todos bien! Now off to the airport and Såo Paulo, Brazil!

The airport trip was... interesting.  The taxi driver spoke no English, and seemed unable to reset the meter.  So he just turned it off and gave us a long story in very fast Spanish.  "No entiendo" we told him.  He called the boss on the phone, and the boss was able to explain in English that we were on a fixed fare of CLP$25,000 - about US$55.  All good.  It was a long trip and took over half an hour even without traffic, plus 3-4 tolls to pay.   We arrived at the airport plenty early.  We had already checked in at the LAN office, but I used my passport to print 2 more boarding passes.  We asked the information desk where we needed to go to turn in our immigration forms, and she told us just go towards the gate at the other end of the terminal.  A short walk took us into the international area, where the workers took our forms and stamped our passports for exit within seconds.  Easy-peasy.  Then on to security, where they x-ray the bags and you go only through a metal detector.  As usual K skated through, and my clothing set off the metal detector.  The woman there checked with a wand, and each button in my shirt and two snaps in my pants set off the wand and had to be inspected.  Then she had a HUGE wand signal on the small of my back.  Nothing at all metallic there.  She called a man over who proceeded to grope me thoroughly, ripping my leather money belt out of my pants and wanding it repeatedly.  The stupid wand kept beeping at the nylon zippers of the money belt.  Completely ridiculous.  Fortunately my long shirt covered most of the procedure, and he finally let me limp away, only to be stopped again by the female officer.  She wanted to inspect my bags.  Some sign language indicated she wanted to see the corkscrew we bought in Argentina.  This thing had sailed through 2 Argentinian airport inspections without a problem.  But prohibited to fly in Chile.  Into the special disposal chute with it.  Damn.  They finally left me to get redressed in the wide, public hallway.  What a pain!

We had a mediocre and obscenely expensive lunch to burn the last of our Chilean pesos.  We walked to the end of the concourse and discovered (along with our pilots) that our gate had changed.  A trudge backwards and we found the gate, with the flight now scheduled to leave 10 minutes earlier.  The 767 was pretty full and the boarding took a while, so this became our first LAN flight that left on time instead of 10 minutes early.  We had a fairly comfortable 4-hour flight over the Andes.  Beautiful mountain vistas and a sunset that looked like flowing lava...

Despite our ontime deaprture, we arrived at Såo Paulo 10 minutes early, but had to do a big circle due to air traffic.  After landing there were no gates, so we parked out on the ramp and they shuttled us to the terminal with several buses.  This worked out better than the very long walk through the concourse we had before.  Immigration and customs were a breeze, as was getting cash from the Bradesco Bank ATM, and we grabbed a fixed-fare airport taxi to take us into the heart of the city, Avenida Paulista, and our new apartment.  The cab was 115 Reais, about US$57.50.  It was extravagant, as we could have taken the free LAN bus over to the other airport and grabbed a taxi from there for $US25.  But the big airfare savings from LAN argued for the more convenient taxi.  We had arrived after the famous Såo Paulo rush hour and zipped down the roads with little traffic to arrive at the new place at about 9:45PM.  There we were greeted by Fredy, a friend of the owner, who showed us how to access the Wi-Fi, operate the TV, and other such things.  He left us to unpack and unwind.  We explored around the block behind us and the one in front of us in the dark.  The city was alive and busy, but most things were closed except for restaurants and bars.  We were soon mixed in with the locals enjoying beers and sandwiches while watching the local football team lose on bigscreen TV.  A couple of caipirinhas for nightcaps, and we knew we were back in Brazil!

Here are a few photos of the new apartment...