Brazil : 2 Leaving Manaus

(This text was originally written on Mar. 14, 2003.)

Ok, before I give you the answer to the quiz I asked in my previous travelogue, allow me to make a minor diversion.

Leaving Manaus by plane to Belo Horizonte (Belo) on Feb. 20th, we encountered a few mishaps while checking in at Manaus’ Eduardo Gomes Airport that created unexpected changes to our flight itinerary.

First, we had gotten there a little bit late: with just 45 minutes before the schedule takeoff. Still, it should have been enough time for domestic flight check-in (for an airport with about 10 flights a day.) As the Varig officer was processing our tickets, the computer kept insisting our flight was one connection too many: Manaus->Brasilia->Rio de Janerio->Belo, when our original scheduled flight didn’t include Rio as one of the connections.

Puzzled, the officer asked for his supervisor through a walkie-talkie. But somehow the supervisor was tied up elsewhere. After 15 minutes the supervisor finally came and talked to our officer about how to solve the problem, and that’s when the entire Varig computer system somehow crashed. It took the Varig people another 10 minutes to decide to switch to a manual check-in procedure (as the waiting line for the check-in counter grew to thirty and more passengers.)

By that time, our officer informed us that our scheduled flight to Brasilia was leaving and we wouldn’t make it. Instead, he would put us on another flight to São Paulo, with the “hope” (his words exactly) that there would be another connection flight we could take to Belo from there. (The officer could not confirm whether there was a connecting flight because the computer was down. So much for technology.)

To cut a long story short, we were lucky that there was a connecting flight, but flying to Sao Paulo meant that we had to fly south from Manaus, then fly back northeast again to Belo (which was akin to flying from Sapporo to Tokyo, but making a stop in Osaka first). Add in the time we waited for the connection flight at Sao Paulo, we finally arrived at our hotel in Belo past midnight, three hours later than what we had planned.

But it could have been worse. If there was no connecting flight, we could have been stranded at Sao Paulo airport overnight. Also, with a rare stroke of luck, we met a friend Wladya - whom we knew from our Japan days - on the plane from Manaus to São Paulo.

(Next: Ouro Preto)