Rapid Ticket Buying

Brief interlude here.

My ridiculously inefficient flight plan to get back to Bogota had me taking a three and a half hour flight at eleven thirty PM to Sao Paolo where I would then wait six hours before boarding a plane to Bogota.  This process would be fraught from the get-go.

I called a cab driver named Harley to pick me up at the hostel.  Harley speaks some English and was friendly, so I'd been giving him a call whenever my feet or the local bus system could not get me where I wanted to go.  I called him at seven forty-five PM and asked him to pick me up in one hour, at eight forty-five.  I then ate some leftover pizza, changed into my travel clothes, brushed my teeth, moved some stuff around in my suitcase, and prepare to wait outside.  As I was leaving, the hostel receptionist, who happened to be the same guitar playing man who factored into my sub-par sleeping night before I went on the jungle tour, told me to wait one moment.  He disappeared down a hallway and a minute later emerged with my pillow!  I was very grateful and felt glad I had not complained of his nocturnal musical expressions as I stuffed it into my suitcase.

At eight fifty-five there was no Harley, so I gave him a call that went something like this:

BEN: Hello, Harley?  It's Benjamin from Hostel Manaus.
HARLEY: Benjamin!  Hello!
BEN: Are you on your way to the hostel?
HARLEY: Yes in one hour.
BEN: Um, can you come right now?
HARLEY: What time is your flight?
BEN: Eleven-thirty.
HARLEY: One o'clock?
BEN: Eleven-thirty.
HARLEY: Eleven!
BEN: Yes, can you come here now?
HARLEY: One moment. [pause]  I'll come in thirty minutes.
BEN: Can you come here sooner?  Now, perhaps?
HARLEY: In thirty minutes I will come.  What time is it now?
BEN: Nine.
HARLEY: I will come at nine thirty.

And, in fact, he did show up at nine-thirty, and we made rapid progress to the airport.  He apologized for the confusion.  We chatted a bit on the way and he told me he was training to be a missionary with the baptist church.  He hoped to go to Africa with his wife in a few years.  Apparently, he is currently a pastor.  This did not prevent him from overcharging me, which left me with a bit of a sour feeling.

In the Manaus airport you do not proceed directly to a check-in desk.  Instead, you wait for your flight to be called on a monitor then proceed through a tinted glass doorway to wait in line.  I made my way to the front of the line in about half an hour, handed over my Irish passport, and placed the first of my bags on the belt.

The first bit of confusion I overheard in Portuguese and put together that they were trying to figure out how an American had an Irish passport.  I offered that I had two passports.  They asked for the American one and began to look through both.  They flipped back and forth through the pages several times.  Then they asked me if I had an onward ticket for leaving Colombia.

The onward ticket is not checked if you arrive from the United States, but I had heard it was enforceable, and apparently if you are departing from Brazil, you need one.  It was now ten forty-five.  I offered to buy one right there, pulled out my laptop and discovered that the airport's wireless network was down.  They suggested I go to a window and buy a ticket, and walked me over.  I quickly established that the only ticket I could buy at that counter was one back to Brazil which would be expensive and only compound my problems.  So I exited the check-in area and went to the information desk where they directed me to a small internet cafe.

There was a free machine in the cafe, and I sat down at ten fifty and began furiously typing.  As a fan of kayak.com, I went there and began zipping through itineraries for one-way tickets.  Washington D.C.: seven hundred dollars.  New York City: six hundred fifty dollars.  Miami: two hundred sixty dollars.  I had a winner -- I was going to Miami.

As I plodded through the LAN Airlines purchasing process, the price of the ticket went up about thirty dollars, but I was all set to press "buy" when the web site informed my that to use a MasterCard on their site, it needed to be registered as a "SecureMasterCard".  If you live in the U.S., try calling your credit card issuer and tell them you would like to sign up for this.  I suspect you will talk to at least five people who have no idea what you are talking about and eventually try to sign you up for a new card that may or may not have it.  I know because I tried in August.

Ten fifty-seven.  Back on kayak, now clicking on the Expedia link instead of the LAN Airlines one in the hopes of actually being able to buy the ticket.  The search comes back with a price of one thousand nine hundred dollars.  This has me concerned until I notice that the date is off by a day.  I switch days and the two hundred sixty dollar ticket appears.  Expedia's purchase process is more expeditious and soon I had a printed confirmation of my flight to Miami on January 21st (I am pretty sure I will need a visa to volunteer, so I had been thinking of spending the following week in the U.S. for a little while now -- I will probably fly from there to either New York or D.C. -- cast your vote!)

Five past eleven.  Looking harried and saying my flight number in broken Portuguese I get back into the check-in area, where the line has dwindled to about three people.  A clerk comes by, looks at my ticket, and moves me to second in line.  I end up with a different staff member checking me in, who starts the process but just as we are trying to communicate about where my bags are (I had left them with other checker-inner) said in-checker comes over to the counter and rescues me.  She writes down my onward flight information, and hands me a boarding pass.

After making my way through a rather relaxed security detail, I proceed downstairs and onto a bus which starts moving the moment I sit down.  I sit down in the plane at eleven-thirty, they close the doors, and I'm off to Sao Paolo.  Though exhausted, I am happy to report that I am in the Sao Paolo airport.  With a touch of luck, I will have luggage when I arrive in Bogota -- I would hate to go zero for two.