We?’d been in Venezuela for a month and had coped with living in a red light district, the disappearance of our course, and being ushered off a bus at gunpoint. Now it was time to go home.
We?’d been told we had to reconfirm our flights 48 hours before departure. We made the phone call, expecting this to be a formality. But of course it wasn?’t. To our dismay, ? perhaps even horror, ? they had no record that the eight of us were due to fly out. Stunned, we called in reinforcements, getting our friends in the samba band to phone the next day and establish exactly what the issue was. The issue was simple as far as the aviation company was concerned: ? we weren’?t on the flight. We got our friends to explain that we were sitting there with tickets in our hands, and after much to-ing and fro-ing they agreed that there might have been a mistake and that we should go to the airport after all.
Relieved by the narrowness of our escape, we went out to the market square to pick up a few souvenirs. On the way back, we ordered and demolished our final half chicken, and packed our bags. We headed for the airport, checked in and then waited – and waited – and waited. Some one announced a two hour delay on our 40 minute flight. Some of us had no money left (we’d not yet learned the wisdom of planning for the unexpected) and we needed to eat like teenagers. We were hungry. We pooled our resources and managed to get some soft drinks and a few sandwiches. Then we sat down to wait. The allotted time came and went, then another hour, then another. It was four hours after our scheduled departure time when we boarded the plane and headed back to the relative sanity of Barbados.
Note: This is the final instalment in the Travel Tales in Venezuela series
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