Another travel day... Ecuador to Chile

February 9, 2007

We happily left Guayaquil, Ecuador and headed to Santiago, Chile today. Another travel day, it was bound to be adventurous, but not as crazy as the bus ride with the pisser—at least we hoped not.

We knew our arrival in Santiago was scheduled for almost ten o’clock in the evening, so we wanted to arrange a hotel and a ride from the airport in advance. This isn’t as easy as one would think. We started sending emails to different hotels prior to our departure from San Francisco near the end of January. Unfortunately, we never heard back from any of them. The day before our departure from Ecuador, we called our desired hotel (Hotel Monte Carlo) to ensure we had a reservation at arrival. They couldn’t pick us up at the airport, but we secured a reservation. Whew!

We landed in Santiago on schedule around 9:30 PM local time. We quickly deplaned, headed to the immigration check point, grabbed our bags, and, after customs, we braced ourselves for the normal onslaught of taxi cab drivers dying for our business. Our plan was to quickly grab some local currency at the airport ATM and jump in a cab. At least that was the plan… when we walked out of customs we saw a young Chilean gentleman holding a sign that said “Marc Heckman.” Perfect, we thought… the hotel actually came through with transportation for us – nice, we don’t have to haggle with the many cab drivers. Marc gave him the head nod and a big smile, he acknowledged, and we made our way towards him.

We started walking out of the airport without going to the ATM and I decided to ask the young gentlemen if we can pay him in US Dollars. He turned and explained we could take care of it at the hotel. The Velazquez Hotel won’t have any problems handling this transaction.

I turned to Marc, “The Velazquez Hotel?” I said, “That isn’t the place we called yesterday.” Marc and I kind of stop behind the guy and opened our trusty Lonely Planet guide—I scanned the page for the Velazquez Hotel. I couldn’t find the place on my first scan. The guy stopped, looked back inquisitively and waited for us up ahead; we quickly caught up with him. We had no idea where we were going, but figured it would be an experience and, at the least, a ride into the city center and a place to stay.

We got into the car and immediately noticed his gas tank was on empty—as in below the red line. As we drove out of the airport, headed to some unknown location, we saw a sign stating Santiago 16 km.

I thought… Oh great, we’re on the road to “somewhere” and the story behind it will be even better when we run out of gas. Every few minutes the car let out a little beep-beep to remind the driver it desperately needed a fill-up. Our driver didn’t seem phased at first and sped by gas station after gas station. The beep-beeps started getting closer together, and I think I saw sweat building on the driver’s forehead in the rear view mirror. Now he began to panic and started driving a little faster, determined not run out of gas with us in the car—we appreciated this. The beep-beeps were now coming about every 30 seconds when we finally exited the freeway.

The driver quickly drove to the hotel, even running through a questionable pink light and rolled up to Hotel Diego de Velazquez. We don’t know how they had a reservation for us, maybe an email sent a month or so ago, but they had a room with our name and we had a place to stay that night. We’ll take it!