Hotel San Ignacio to Limbo

 With our flight scheduled to leave at 8 a.m. , respecting the "arrive at the airport 3 hours early"  rule had us waking up at 4 a.m. for a 4:30 a.m. taxi ride to the airport. Continuing the amazing service level of Costa Rica Focus, a knock came at our door at 4:10, revealing a man with a box breakfast of coffee, banana bread, and yoghurt. And dead on 4:30 a taxi driver appeared and .. I would like to say whisked us to the airport. In truth it only took 15 minutes, but it was 15 minutes of battling San Jose area traffic, already heavy at this hour. Also, just before entering the city traffic, we again noted the dangerously curving country road. For a final time, we again realized that this is no place for a bicycle.

Although we already had boarding passes in our phone, we went to the Volaris desk to get the more secure feeling of a paper pass. That's where they nonchalantly informed us that our flight to Cancun was delayed four and half hours! That shifted our comfortable connection at Cancun to a very dicey proposition, especially since we see that we have to change terminals there, now within one hour. 

We passed through security, during which for some reason my shoes triggered an alarm and had to go through the x-ray. They or we also managed to lose the souvenir keychain I had put into one tray. On the other side of security, a typically massive duty free area was offering keychains, at four times the customary price. They also had the souvenir socks, and Dodie went to get some more pairs for granddaughter Violet (having realized that she previously had bought the wrong size), but the four times rule applied there too. So in a last effort to shake $$ free of the tourists, all prices were insanely escalated in this area.

Once we had walked to our prospective gate, it began to sink in on us that we had no chance of making the Cancun connection. So we sent Dodie to go back through security to see if some other arrangement was possible. They would not let her through security backwards, but the Volaris people came out, and there was a meeting in security no man's land.  Volaris laid on a wheelchair for Cancun, that might have a chance of making it, and they shifted us to the front of their plane, to get us off quicker. They also gave us a breakfast voucher, to keep us alive as we languish in San Jose waiting for the flight.

The delay is extra frustrating, because had we known we could have breakfasted in luxury at the hotel and watched birds at their feeder in the morning. Volaris says they knew at 1:00 a.m., not that they bothered to send us any notification!

Glitzy San Jose duty free. We found that prices were 4x normal.

No hope of replacing my souvenir keychain, lost at security, at the prices they want here!

Steve innocently writes his first blog installment, with no idea of how much shit was about to go down.

I am typing this at 7:00 a.m. now in San Jose. At least they have free wifi and we found a power plug, so presumably we can amuse ourselves for the necessary hours. One fun activity I can do is to phone Rogers, our phone provider in Canada. We just got their latest bill, and see they nailed us for $100 of roaming charges. We presume that their SIM, buried in an unused phone, managed to connect to a network in Europe and spend $100, talking to it's little SIM friends?, before they shut it down. We certainly got no use for the $100, that we know of! Our new policy is to rip any Rogers SIM out by the roots and wrap it in toilet paper, to avoid this kind of telcom scam.

Well, a lot of water has flowed over the bridge since I wrote the paragraphs above. First, to clear up about Rogers. I did have fun calling them, using our Claro SIM, which will call US and Canada as well as Costa Rica. But it turned out Rogers had not in fact nailed us for roaming charges. Rather we had run up our bill by talking to Booking.com in UK for 77 minutes, having inadvertently dialed their not toll free number!

Moving on to the air flight problem for today. We had figured we could survive the 4 1/2 hour delay, because we had left so much time for the transfer in Cancun. But Volaris fixed this, by delaying the flight again, for a further three hours, making it a 7 1/2 total delay. So that meant we would miss our Westjet  connections in Cancun and Vancouver. I jumped on the Westjet website and found the last flight of the day from Cancun to Victoria. It would leave at 7:25 p.m. Now I needed an absolute promise from Volaris that this time they would actually leave San Jose at their new posted time, of 3:30 p.m. And I needed to know when we would arrive in Cancun. 5:30, they assured me. So I went ahead and rebooked us onto the 7:25 p.m. Westjet flight from Cancun, paying just $300 in penalty fees. I did all this on Skype, since Claro did not seem to want to call Westjet.

We got our first hint that Volaris was not going to fly at their original delayed time, 12:27 I think it was, when I noted that they had no airplane at the gate. When the posted boarding time passed, still nothing happened, and no staff at the gate. But one man did wander in from the ramp area, and he was mobbed by passengers. He told them something (in Spanish) and went away, leaving ... nobody. I decided to try finding someone back at the Volaris desk on the other side of security. But I could not get through, and returned. Now I did find three employees at the gate desk, and they were engaging in a long discourse with a crowd of increasingly agitated passengers. All in Spanish. Two police showed up, a riot was brewing. I filmed some of it, for the coming court case. I piped up about would anybody tell me in English what the hell was going on. This was basically ignored. But I eventually gathered that they were not going until 3:30, and that they would supply lunch at a restaurant near the duty free. But despite being read to from their own policies by one erudite lady in the crowd, they would make no other reimbursement nor offer any other sort of help.

The Volaris free lunch

The Volaris people are mobbed

Steve reaches Westjet on Skype

The App had the best arrival estimate, but the local staff denied it.
As it happened, 6:59 p.m. was over optimistic.

Volaris then went on to throw different kinds of mud at us. First off, their quote of a 5:30 p.m. arrival in Cancun based on the 3:30 p.m. departure turned out to be San Jose time. Cancun is one hour ahead of San Jose. Scratch one hour of leeway time! Next, they did not actually leave at 3:30, futzing around with loading the passengers onto two buses, and driving them out on the tarmac, where they got to slowly crawl up portable access stairs into the plane. They left closer to 4:30 p.m. Scratch another hour of leeway time.

As  it happened the plane landed at  7:00 p.m., It then seemed to go on a tour of the terminals and gates, before dropping us about as far from Westjet as they could manage. To put it another way, they stopped at Terminal 2 and Westjet is at Terminal 4. We had asked for a wheelchair to be laid on, to speed the transfer, and they did that. But the wheelchair man only took us to the exit of Terminal 2, before declaring both that that was as far as he goes, and also did we know that he is not paid by the airline, so did we have any cash?

We waded our way through taxi drivers wanting $20 for the rest of the trip to terminal 4, and got on a free shuttle. It was of course all in vain, since our bird had flown about 1/2 hour before. Still, we eventually fetched up at the Westjet counter, and found some employees hanging around - since all the "with it" passengers were long gone. We just asked them to confirm that our plane was gone, and not miraculously delayed. Yes, it was gone, but the employees set to work to find a re-book. They came up with one, and very surprisingly did it without further charges! Only thing, the first flight out now is 5 p.m. tomorrow!

So that means we are sleeping on the airport floor. We know the airport area, and in fact there are no places to stay, even if we would be willing to leave and return. We also know that Cancun taxi rates are astronomical. So, we are basically stranded here. Fortunately, there is at least one 24/7 restaurant, and if you are willing to pay $60 for two sandwiches, you will not starve. Yes, we did pay the $60, which I think gives me the right to be typing this at their table.

This kid was from Marseilles, took a liking to Dodie's stick.

Well, it does look like a plane! Westjet staff in Cancun told us that Volaris' excuse for being late - rain in Cancun, was bullshit.

This Cancun Terminal 4 restaurant could be our home for the next 17 hours

That is, as long as our money holds out to be buying these $60 sandwiches!