Saturday 25th Jan. A long day in planes! Adelaide to Buenos Aires

We had an extremely long day in planes today but in the end, it was well and truly worth it. Arriving at Adelaide Airport around 6.15am, we had plenty of time to check in and have a coffee before we needed to be at our gate for the flight to Melbourne. Our luggage had been checked all the way through to Buenos Aires. While having coffee with our travelling companions, Millie and Geoff, we met up with a woman from my gym and started chatting to her. She was heading to Laos to a bear sanctuary. She kept chatting and then Rob received a phone call from our airline to say that we needed to be on the plane as the plane had been loaded and was just waiting for the last passengers, that was us! Any way we left Adelaide around 8.10 am in the morning and had had an uneventful trip to Melbourne. In Melbourne we had a couple of hours to transfer from the domestic terminal to the International one. Our next flight was to take 13 hours, Melbourne to Santiago, Chile, flying with Latin American Airlines. This trip included us flying over the international dateline and so time went backwards, and we arrived in Santiago on Saturday at a time that was before we’d actually left Melbourne! The plane we travelled on was a very new one and had all the flash lighting on it to simulate, dusk, dawn, night etc. This would have been OK had they not kept us in the dark for so long. They clearly hoped everyone would sleep. Out of the 13 hours in the plane, at least 10 of them were in night mode. We all struggled to sleep instead opting to watch movies. Arriving in Santiago, we originally were going to have a 2 hour wait to catch our next plane to Buenos Aries, but this ballooned out to nearly 5 hours due to issues with finding a crew for the plane. By the time we finally arrived in Buenos Aries it was dark and approaching 9pm. We along with the other 14 or so people from the Australian group were met by a representative from the Swan Hellenic cruise company and were then taken by coach to our beautiful Sofitel Hotel, arriving around 10pm. By now we were all feeling exhausted and were desperate for sleep but we had been given a voucher for dinner by the cruise company, so we headed to the restaurant and ended up having a delicious dinner. We finished up back in our rooms at 11pm. Rob and Geoff estimated that we had been on the go for about 30 hours without proper rest so we were pretty exhausted and after a shower fell into bed….because we were going to receive a wake-up call at 4.20am on Sunday so we could be ready for our next flight to Ushuaia.