Crosstown Traffic

Tuesday 13 April
Rio de Janeiro – São Paulo – Campo Grande, Brazil – Santa Cruz, Bolivia

I spent my last day in Rio just faffing around. I went for a walk on the beach to catch my last few rays before heading to the Andes again. So my flight was at 7.30 in the evening. I got a cab just before 5 – it takes about half an hour to get to the airport. Although perhaps I should have considered that it was rush hour. You forget about things like that, and days of the week, when you are travelling. Normality isn’t important.

Except when you have a plane to catch. I don’t know if rush hour traffic in Rio is normally really bad, or whether there was some crazy car crash or emergency road works, but we hardly went over ten miles an hour for a couple of hours. As we inched along the road I could see the airport agonisingly close on the right hand side as the road seemed to go past it and take the longest route possible. I was watching the time and making various justifications as the minutes ticked away. “Well if I get there with an hour to spare I’ll still be able to make it.” I couldn’t do much while I was still in the car so I resigned myself to my fate and tried not to get too anxious.

I arrived with less than thirty minutes before take off. As I dashed out of the cab I had forgotten that I had left my sunglasses on my lap. They were gone. Second pair lost this holiday. Given that they were only $5 it wasn’t the biggest problem.

I ran into the airport and tried to find the departure board. My flight wasn’t listed. That wasn’t a good sign. As I was flying with Gol I found their next flight and worked out where their check in desks were. I ran through the airport with people jumping out of the way, fearing for their lives. It was kind of funny but I needed to get a move on.

I arrived at the Gol area and pleaded with the girl who stands in front of the desks to greet people. She went off to talk to someone. Eventually she came back and said that I could check in despite it being officially closed. This wasn’t Ryanair at least.

I checked in and went through security. The guard seemed to want to fuck around with me, looking through my bags for no reason. I wanted to punch him in the face. I raced through to the departure lounge. There was no one at the gate on my boarding card. I checked the information boards. It said the flight had taken off. Arrrrrgh!

One of the passengers pointed me to another gate. I went there but the sign on the gate was for a different flight. I found a Gol employee and tried to ask in a mixture of English and Portuguese if the flight was still here or not, or what was happening. There wasn’t a clear answer. I was persistent. The first person started talking to other people. There was more talking. Nothing was clear. Eventually they pointed me to the gate that the other passenger had pointed me to before. There wasn’t much English spoken. I noticed from the boarding cards that the other people in the queue were holding that they were on the same flight. It hadn’t taken off! Everything was OK!

I flew to São Paulo, an airport that isn’t very nice. You have to guess where you are meant to go for your connecting flight. After going to a couple of wrong terminals I eventually found the right place. There was a Brazilian woman sitting next to me who tried to talk to me in Portuguese for part of the flight. That was interesting. We flew to Campo Grande (where?) and a few people left the plane before heading off to Bolivia.