From desert to jungle: window-seat scenery and airport adventures.

Bye-bye, Atacama Desert!…

We pile into the cars, double-check we haven’t forgotten any suitcases or bags, and hit the road. Where to? The airport, of course!…

The nearest airport is in the small city of Calama, about 100km from our cozy digs in San Pedro de Atacama:

The drive’s a real scenic one – through pretty much the same kind of landscapes we’d just been marveling at across Atacama:

In some places the distances are so vast your eyes simply can’t take them in!

The volcano views are pure magic!

Calama Airport itself is nothing to write home about, but comfortable enough. It’s fairly new, too, with jet bridges for boarding and deplaning – unlike at Sheremetyevo, where they seem to be bussing passengers out to planes more and more often these days, grrr.

Whoa! Over toward the mountains, little tornados whirling around:

Anyway. We boarded, got settled, buckled up, and took off…

What does the Atacama look like from above? Like this:

Barren, mountainous – blue up top, brown down below. And if you look closely, you can spot all kinds of industrial stuff, too – wind farms and fields of solar panels:

Clearly they’re powering the mining operations. And there it is! The Sierra Gorda copper mine:

A few more landscapes:

Aconcagua at sunset! Absolutely stunning. If you’re flying from the Atacama toward Santiago, book a window seat on the left side of the plane.

The Atacama-to-Santiago route – and onward from there – is no cakewalk. It’s a long haul, so we had to spend the night at an airport hotel (perfectly decent), then catch a morning flight to São Paulo.

If anyone ever decides to tackle a route like this – a warning: board stone-cold sober – no beer, no cocktails before you get on the plane. The flight crosses the Andes, and turbulence up there can really toss the plane around. They keep everyone buckled up and don’t open the lavatories for 30–40 minutes, sometimes even an hour, depending on the route, the weather, and the captain’s mood.

But the views out the window are spectacular! Here’s Aconcagua again:

Multicolored rock outcrops, obviously volcanic:

What a gorgeous mountain:

And more of that riot of color:

Then come the dry Argentine landscapes:

We cross them, and we’re back in São Paulo (we’d only recently connected through here on the way from Moscow to Patagonia)…

After mulling it over, I decided I should air my grievances about the ground service at GRU in São Paulo – specifically, the runaround they gave us over our baggage during the connection. But first, some context…

When you’re flying internationally from country A to country B on a nonstop flight, everything’s simple. You land, clear passport control, grab your bags, and walk through customs – the nothing-to-declare lane, assuming you’ve got nothing to declare (and in my case that’s always). Usually nobody bats an eye at your suitcase, though sometimes they’ll ask you to put it through a scanner – that happens a lot at Sheremetyevo now, often in China, and elsewhere as the occasional spot check.

If you’re flying from country A to country C with a connection in country B, then almost everywhere your suitcase gets transferred directly from one plane to the next, and it’s basically the same deal as above. Sure, bags get lost sometimes, but that’s rare. There are a few exceptions, though. In the U.S., for example, even if you’re connecting onward to another country, you still have to collect your bags, go through inspection, and recheck them with airport staff – at least, that’s how it was 10-plus years ago. Maybe things have changed.

Now let’s crank up the complexity. You’re flying from country A to country B with a connection in that same country B – so the first leg is international and the second is domestic. Naturally, you go through passport control at the connection because you’re entering a new country. But what happens to your bags? Funnily enough, it varies.

As far as I recall, in the Schengen Area your bag goes all the way to the final destination. In China, it’s a lucky dip. If you fly through Beijing on Air China, you have to collect your bags during the layover, haul them through a scanner, and recheck them. We recently flew through Beijing on Hainan Airlines, though, and the bags sailed straight through to Sanya with no extra inspection. Go figure – maybe the rules differ by terminal, since those two airlines use different ones. In the UK we once had a completely absurd situation – some of the bags made it all the way through, some we had to collect during the connection, and one bag just vanished into thin air! Another oddity occurred on a Moscow–Istanbul–Ankara trip: they sent us to the domestic terminal, but the baggage went via the international one!

So, those are the kinds of curveballs you run into. And now, on to the Brazilian edition.

We were flying Santiago, Chile – São Paulo, Brazil – Manaus, also Brazil. That meant the first leg was international and the second domestic. Right off the bat they told us that on arrival we’d need to clear immigration, collect our bags, go through customs, and then recheck everything for the second leg. Fine, no sweat – we had plenty of time. Yeah, right. A not-exactly-small A321 was being processed by two – TWO!!! – Brazilian immigration officers whose working pace was very slow. By the time we got through, our entire time buffer had evaporated and we switched to full-on sprint mode.

We grabbed our bags and headed through customs – nobody there, nobody cared. Onward to recheck our bags.

Important detail: we had soft duffel bags, not wheeled suitcases, because the former are way easier to load onto buses, take up less space, and pack down better. Anyway, since the duffel bags had no wheels, we needed luggage carts – several, because there were eight of us… well, actually six by then – one couple had split off on a different route to Rio de Janeiro. Still, several carts needed. And since arrivals were on the first floor and departures on the second, the escalator was a no-go, so we headed for the elevators… and ran smack into an ungodly line. We stood there for a while, when suddenly one sharp-eyed woman in our group spotted an elevator sign a bit farther down – so we dashed over. We pressed the button; the down arrow lit up but… nothing happened. The elevator simply never came. That’s when I realized the fun was just beginning – and, as usual, I was right.

So what to do? We didn’t want to go back to the massive line, which had only gotten longer. But necessity is the mother of invention. I sent one of our group upstairs on the escalator empty-handed, then started loading the bags onto the escalator one by one, with pauses, like a makeshift conveyor belt. We placed the bags on at the bottom; up top, he grabbed them. Bonus: they found carts up there almost immediately.

Hooray – we’re in the departure area. We head to the check-in counters, and they send us somewhere else. Turns out that’s where they check in new passengers; transit passengers were supposed to drop their bags off somewhere on the first floor – behind a pharmacy. Why didn’t anyone mention that from the start? What was the point of all the elevator-and-escalator circus?

Fine. No line for the elevator going down, so we head back to the first floor and look for the baggage drop-off… and can’t find it. Nobody knows anything, there are no signs – what are we supposed to do? We ask the staff, and they tell us our bags need to be dropped off on the second floor, in the departure area. At this point I was already muttering expletives under my breath…

By now we were old hands at escalator cargo transport, so back upstairs we go, head to check-in again (this time from the other side of the counters), and they send us right back to the first floor! That’s when we just had to kick up a fuss. Didn’t help. The staff couldn’t have cared less, and the clock was ticking. Our flight was leaving soon!

Then DZ had a brainwave – he ran down to the first floor on a reccie mission, bag-free. After a while, he located that godforsaken transit baggage drop-off! It turned out it was tucked away at the far end of the terminal, past three turns. No signs, nothing. No wonder the local staff had no idea it existed!

At last, we got there: time to drop off the bags. Think that’s the end of the story? No chance…

So, we’re at the baggage drop counter loading bags onto the belt, when they tell us that since our bags don’t have wheels, we need to carry them over to a cart off to the side – and later someone will take it to the baggage loading area. Right. But all the other passengers’ luggage – including bags without wheels! – goes off on the belt, while ours just sits in a cart in the corner?! But this wasn’t my first rodeo in Latin America. I know how things work here. There was a very real chance our bags would simply be forgotten and never loaded. It’s happened before. So what do we do now?

First, I started trying to persuade them to call whomever needed calling and get that cart picked up. They assured me they’d absolutely not do that, but that everything would be fine! I didn’t buy it for a second and said I wanted to see with my own eyes that it got wheeled away. This back-and-forth went on for a while.

Why was I being so persistent? Simple: in Manaus, we weren’t checking into a hotel where lost bags could just show up the next day, no big deal. We were boarding a boat and spending a couple of days cruising upriver to the middle of nowhere. If our bags got left behind in São Paulo, we wouldn’t see them for days.

I tried explaining all this to the women at the counter. They nodded, said we needed to head to the plane, that departure time was close, that our bags would definitely arrive, and so on. Ha! I know how local service works. I started explaining that if our bags didn’t fly with us, we’d basically never see them again because we’d be heading off on a boat – and that I’d sue their damn company. Didn’t help. I tried switching tactics… still no dice.

What finally did the trick was dead simple. I asked DZ to record video of both the cart with our bags and me explaining, pleading, and demanding they roll it where it needed to go. Bingo! The woman called somebody, and a couple of minutes later a baggage handler showed up and wheeled our bags off to where they should’ve gone in the first place.

We got to the plane when boarding was already in full swing. Good thing we’d sent the women in our group to buy some whisky to calm our nerves. And they came through! So quietly, around the corner, we knocked back some good, nerve-soothing, single-malt Scotch from plastic cups. Phew! Cheers!

Some especially eagle-eyed reader might ask: why on earth were we putting ourselves through all this when we could’ve just chartered a private plane straight from Santiago to Manaus? My answer: we’ve been burned by that kind of “solution” before. It’s a risky move: you can easily end up not flying anywhere at all. So sure, it’s less comfortable and takes longer, but the odds of actually reaching your destination are still better – and that’s what counts.

Eventually, we made it – safe and sound! And the little boat waiting for us in Manaus by the riverbank – hhere it is. The white one in the background ) ->

And the river? It was the Rio Negro – one of the main tributaries of the mighty Amazon. But more on that in tomorrow’s post…

The best hi-res photos from our LatAm-2026 trip are here.