Hotel California

Willy Wonka's Golden Boarding Card!
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Back in March or April, I'd booked a flight back to Buenos Aires from Ushuaia, to take me north in 4 hours what had taken me 40+ hours south in a coach.

So I checked out, and took the short taxi hop to the airport, and guess what-  the pilots of Aerolineas had called a 48-hour strike. The place was chaos, with only two people on the desks (this is an airport which only sees about 6 flights a day anyway), and lots of arm waving, shrugging and general confusion.

After an hour in the queue, the woman told me to go back to my hostel and wait, they'd probably have it sorted by midday. Yeah, right.

I saw this view a lot, led of the airport floor
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So i went back to join the German couple there, who'd also booked a flight later in the day, after their one with the only other airline LADE the day before got cancelled because of the erupting volcano in El Chaiten apparently made it too dangerous to fly.

So no news that day, and after another taxi trip up to the airport the next day I waited only to be told the same thing. I didn't mind too much, as I had a couple of things to do and the place was nice.  But after the second day stuck there, with no news and no prospect of getting off the lump of rock at the end of the world, a bit of cabin fever started to set in.

And I saw this view a lot too, the view from the back of an Ushauian taxi, albeit a very nice one!
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So the third day, all I could do was go and literally camp myself at the airport and wait. So I arrived at 7am, keen to get on the list (again). I was secretly hoping I wouldn't get a seat and be put in a nice hotel for the night with a proper matress and cable TV, but they managed to get me what seemed like the last seat on the last flight that day, arriving back in Buenos Aires at 1am, barely able to stay awake.