After our final night on the ship, it was time to say goodbye to Antarctica and our friends. This being Antarctica, things were subject to change, and they did. After clearing out of our cabins, we spent most of the morning waiting to hear when we’d get a weather slot for our planes to come down and pick us up. The ship was anchored outside of Frei station on King George island ready to go, but we stayed on the ship until we got word that the planes had taken off. This wound up happening just after the hotel crew threw together an impromptu lunch, which looked like repurposed leftovers (sweet and sour turkey for instance, great idea), and they did a fine job.
Then we were off to shore for some more waiting. We walked roughly a mile back from the shore to the plane parking area and it started raining. Unfortunately we had to wait about an hour in the rain in the middle because of plane traffic so we couldn’t cross the runway. Luckily we all had our gear on so it wasn’t bad.
Once we made it back to Punta Arenas, and got ourselves settled and desperately used to internet to catch up, we had a really fantastic dinner at a French restaurant with some friends from the boat.
Finally the next day we were off to Santiago again to stay the night at the airport hotel. It was surprisingly nice, we spent most of the time at the bar going through photos and writing blog posts and enjoying being able to use the interwebs again. We also ran into another friend from the ship and chatted with her for a while.
The next morning it was off to Easter island (Rapa Nui.) Being at the airport hotel must have made us overconfident, because we started off running late and missed the window to check our bags. Luckily we had stashed one bag at the hotel and our other bags worked as carry-on in a pinch. We did have to race through the airport, and immigration for some reason, despite not leaving the country, carrying all of our bags, but we made it, with me swearing “never again.”
