A real roller coaster of a day. We arrived a little earlier than expected at Santiago but after 1 in the morning. With five hours to wait, Joan had the idea of trying to book into the Holiday Inn on the basis of a missed booking three days ago when we were meant to arrive. Somehow we were given a room which meant we could rest for a few hours and shower before making the next stage of our journey.

The hotel is just across the road, literally, and we were in the departures hall in less than a minute. Kevin joined the baggage drop queue whilst Joan used the automatic check-in machine. Here the problem started. It printed out Joan's boarding pass but then said there was a problem with Kevin’s. Joan tried again and still the same issue. After queueing at the LAN counter, Joan was told to go to baggage drop. The lass on check-in took ages to process our seats and when she did, it became clear that Joan was booked on the flight but Kevin wasn’t. The flight was overbooked and Kevin was put on stand-by. We explained that we were travelling together and that we needed to pick-up a hire car at a certain time at the other end. We were told to wait aside. There seemed to be a lot of discussion. Another chap seemed to be in the same boat. After some time, another lass came and spoke to the waiting chap. She walked off and he indicated for us to go with them and we were lead through to security. It was then that the lass realised we were with him and she seemed angry and told us to follow her back to check-in. There we were given boarding passes and told to follow her.

When we got to the gate, the flight was boarding. There were us, two solo chaps and a Brazilian family of four on the side. The Brazilian family were very angry and one of the staff threatened to not let them travel. After a few minutes Kevin asked the lass who had took us to the gate what was going on. She said she was getting his seat. The Brazilian family were still arguing. Then the staff let them board. By now we had decided that Joan should travel to Puerto Montt on this flight to secure the car and that she would wait the four hours for Kevin to come on the next flight. Joan went to board and was told her seat had now gone – presumably to the angry Brazilians – and we were both going to be reassigned to a later flight. So it seems being angry and pushy paid off whilst the people who were patient were left behind.

Joan explained that we needed to contact the hire car company, Econorent, and our cabanas to let them know we would be late. Many car hire companies in Chile are based "downtown" and send a driver to collect you and take you to their office, rather than having an office at the airport. They meet your flight so if you are not on it, the driver won’t wait four hours. We were originally told that the airport staff would call both but then we were given two phone cards. Joan explained that whilst she spoke Spanish, she didn’t like doing so on the phone plus we had no idea how these phone cards worked. Reluctantly the lass who had brought us to the gate agreed to call the car hire company from a public phone with the phone card. The phone card seemed to involve entering lots of information on an automated service. After quite a rigmarole, she said “No contesta” – no answer.

Joan suggested that she try the Puerto Montt downtown number but she refused. She did however say that Econorent had an office downstairs. She said we could go there ourselves or she would do it for us and come back and tell us. As we had already cleared security, we asked her to do it and sat down to wait. After ¾ of an hour there was no sign of her. We went to the passenger help desk that had issued the phone cards but they couldn’t recall which lass had helped us. We did however receive vouchers for our inconvenience worth nearly $700 USD on OneWorld flights.

We went to the Econorent desk where a girl phoned the Puerto Montt office and were told that as we had not shown up on Monday they had cancelled our booking, even though we had pre-paid. We had also been told that the lass had visited the desk some while before and knew this. Joan luckily had her phone and showed Econorent that we had sent two emails to their central reservations team, one on Sunday and one yesterday, changing the booking. The girl kindly rang central reservations and they confirmed the emails had been received and the information had been passed on to the Puerto Montt branch.

The girl rang Puerto Montt again and they said they were closing early today, being Christmas Eve. Also they had no cars. To her credit, she persisted with them and told us to go and have a coffee and come back later. By this time we had about an hour before boarding so were getting nervous, knowing we had to clear security again. We nipped over to the Holiday Inn to use their WiFi and email our cabana and post a miserable Facebook status. Without a car we couldn’t get to our lodgings in Puerto Varas and besides the car was our means of transport from here on in. The office of the hire car company would not open again till after Xmas so we would be stuck in Puerto Montt for two nights before we could sort things out. We had already lost three nights of our 6 night, unrefundable booking at Puerto Varas.

Back at Econorent, the Puerto Montt office hadn’t called back so the girl rang them again. We were getting quite worried that the rest of our holiday was about to spectacularly unravel! The rest of the holiday is a multi-based road trip and without a car… The girl was nothing but persistent and after a short conversation, said: “You have a car.” We thanked her and were so relieved.

Back through security and at the gate we decided to queue up to get on the plane so they wouldn’t try to bump us off again. (We normally wait until the queue at the gate has died down before boarding.) Our hearts sank as we handed the staff our boarding passes. She said, “Uno momento” and stood us aside. She went to another desk and started looking through papers. Our hearts sank and we fully expected the worse. But she came back with two new boarding passes. “New seats.” We looked at the numbers and realised we had been put in a row of three with Joan by the window and Kevin by the aisle – separated, but, hey!, we were just glad to be getting on.

When we boarded, we had been allocated seats with extra legroom and a row to ourselves on a plane which was very full. Plus we were on the side which overlooked the Andes and all the volcanoes. Someone had been kind to us and we wondered if it had been the girl who didn’t come back to tell us the bad news about our car hire.

The flight to Puerto Montt is only an hour and a half and Joan was in her element naming all the volcanoes along the way, in particular, her favourite volcano, Llaima and the three near Pucon, Villarica, Quetrupillan and Lanin. What sort of person has a favourite volcano?

At Puerto Montt we split forces. Kevin went to the car rental desk where there was a huge queue whilst Joan awaited the baggage. Unsurprisingly our cases were nowhere to be seen. The baggage conveyor belt stopped and an airport official took Joan’s and other’s baggage tickets and marched us off to the other end of the airport. Whilst others crowded round his desk, Joan spotted in a corner two lonely matching suitcases with their distinctive blue and pink One Yen ribbons, a gift from a Japanese innkeeper at Yudanaka (see previous Travel Blog to Japan: http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog/ke vinandjoan/1/tpod.html )

At the Econorent desk, it seemed we had got the double cabin, 4WD that we had reserved and headed off to Puerto Varas. Joan is notoriously bad at estimating distances, usually drastically underestimating them. She thought Puerto Varas was about an hour’s drive away. It turns out she was wrong. Save for a traffic jam, It was about 20 minutes away. We drove up the paved Ruta 5 (see virtually all our blogs about Chile: http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog/ke vinandjoan/4/tpod.html , http://www.travelpod.com/dashboard/trip /2 , http://joannieandkevin.blogspot.cl/ ) and made town before the shops closed. We immediately spotted a Lider, a big Chilean supermarket chain, and after a week and a half on Easter Island, were relieved to find a fully stocked, modern store with even fresh fruit!!

Our cabana was a short drive to the end of the promenade. Clean, efficient and belaying its Teutonic influences, we were relieved to find a pristine, wooden cabana with a balcony overlooking the lake with working WiFi. In honour of the local cuisine, which is distinctly Germanic, we had a fondue on the balcony.