We were excited by the final trip to the airport after preparing to leave for the past year! However this excitement quickly passed when we arrived early at the LAN check in desk to be told that the flight would be delyed for 6 hours. Since we arrived so early, eager to leave, this ment sitting at the airport doing nothing but watching the clock. However we did get $80 worth of food vouvhers out on LAN for our troubles! Needless to say we were pretty full by the time we boarded the Air NZ flight to Aukland. The first led of the trip was great- good movies and comfy seats but when we were transferred the the LAN plane it was a pretty uncomfortable 10 hours. We are pretty sure they turned off the airconditioning when everyone was sleeping to save fuel!.
Touching down in Chile was fantastic, we were all happy to have arrived finally in South America. We caught a taxi to La Casa Roja in the old colonial district of Santiago- near the center of town. Dispite the smog, grafitti and rubbish, Satiago could be a beauitful city with the Andes surrounding it. La Casa Roja is a very busy backpackers which has the capacity of approx 100 people. We shared a 8 person dorm for 7000 pesos each. We had a pretty boozy night to celebrate our arrival drinking with another Aussie chap Will (who was on our same flight over from Sydney) until 3am.
The next morning the boys woke up at 8.30am looking worse for wear and then went to spend the day at customs to get the bikes which had apparently arrived on the Monday! Matteo and Dave caught a taxi into town to an area with lots of automotive dealers, and managed to pick up two batteries for the bikes, chain lube, and oil for 75,000 pesos (¿ ripped off ?) after somehow explaining to the taxi driver we needed to go to the customs office for cargo - we were happily surprised to see our 2 bikes waiting in the warehouse. The first step was getting the original Airway Bill from the FastAir warehouse office. It cost us $30US to get the original Airway Bill then we varified the bike VIN numbers with Customs to get a temporary registration number and stamp on the Airway Bill.
The office shut between which gave us an opportunity to walk to the near by petrol station to pick up a couple of litres of fuel so we could ride the bikes out of there. The next step was going back to the FastAir warehouse office to pay the storage bill of 60,000 pesos. We were then able to finally get the bikes out the crates, put the new batteries in and ride away. The funny thing was we forgot to bring our rear-view mirrors... not the best way to start drivig on the wrong side of the road in a foriegn country! 12 hours later we were back at the hostel. Jet lagged, still hungover and ready for bed.
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