Semana Santa, Day 2

We wake up in the Lima airport at 4:00am. We check the boards for our La Paz flight. There is still no listing. We walk around the international terminal to find all the shopping centers open, however, there are absolutely no airline personnel. At the security gate we ask a guard. She called our airline, LAB; our flight is cancelled. The only way to talk to anyone associated with the airline is to immigrate into Peru and get to a help desk. Luckily, at this time there is no line at immigration. We are now tourists of Peru, about three days earlier than expected.

Once in the main terminal we find a customer service counter. Unlike in Colombia, all airport service personnel also speak English. We never thought we would be so happy to be back in the land of main stream tourism. A very nice woman, outraged for us, helps us file a complaint and searches all airlines for flights to La Paz. The next flight leaves at 9:00pm on another airline, or 6:00am tomorrow on LAB and our tickets would be transferred. After about 20 minutes of deliberation we decide to skip the Bolivia portion of our trip. For this trip there will be no Lake Titicaca, no hammocks in Copacabana, no Island of the Sun (mythical birthplace of the Incas). Instead we opt to find a flight to Cusco and start our time there three days early.

The woman at the help desk points us in the direction of a travel agent who can get us tickets on a flight to Cusco in an hour. We go up stairs and find Inka Wasi travel agency, there are two workers; one is behind the desk and the other is curled up in a chair in the corner with his coat over him. Remember, it is a bit before 6:00 in the morning, we are all a bit tired. The man behind the desk has very little English and he wakes up the man in the corner. We tell him what we need. And the second man tells the man behind the counter what he needs to do to help us. As the man behind the counter is typing in our information a medic team arrives and starts taking the vitals of the man in the corner. He is not sleeping but very ill. Is it a heart attack, flu, we are not sure? We suddenly feel like our cancelled plane is nothing in the grand scheme of things. However the man who speaks English continues to help us purchase our tickets, while his blood pressure is being taken and the medics are helping him into the prone position and administer a few shots. We get the tickets, along with a good story, for about $100 each and we rush on our way to the gate. At 7:00am we board the plane to Cusco. We sit back, drink some Inca Cola, think of all our friends boarding the school busses for one last day of work before Semana Santa. (We took our personal days to get a jump on the vacation.)