Running man

In order to avoid a 50 hours long busride, I booked a flight from Santa Cruz to Salta in Argentina. It was booked for Octobre 8^th at 10h15. The evening before was my last night with Emett and Roman, so this had to be the big goodbye night. And we succeeded because I only got to bed at 6 o'clock. In order to be in time at the airport (2 hours before departure), I had to get up at 7h00. Of course I tought it would be a good idea to sleep for an hour. Brilliant idea! Immediately I went into a deep coma. Suddenly I woke up because somebody was pushing me. It was our English roommate who stayed in the night before.

- “Didn't you have a flight at 10h00?”

- “Yes”

- “It's almost nine”

- “Oh shit!”

Apparently I didn't hear the alarm of my cell phone, I was in too deep, and although we had been so smart to also put the alarm on Emett's phone at 7h00, we also slept straight through that, it was already going for a long time, but none of the three of us woke up. Luckily the English guy remembered. In a bit of a panic a start shoving everything in my backpack, ran to the reception to order a taxi, finished the bag, jumped in the taxi and said to the guy (in spanish by the way, it is amazing what you suddenly can do when you're full of adrenaline) that I was already much too late for my flight. He seemed to have gotten the message, because what followed was a race on the highway to airport, zigzagging between cars. I felt like I was in a high speed car race like in the movies, but humming the theme of The A-Team or Knightrider would maybe have been too much.

At the airport, my next race started: try to pass check-in as fast as possible. There was only one line at the check-in desk of my company and it was really long. So I passed immediately the whole line and went to the counter to try and catch an employee. I succeeded and passed the check-in in a few minutes. At the costums however I was less succesfull. At that moment it was already 9h50 and I still had to wait in the long costums line. I noticed however a few other nervous people who were trying to pass to the front of the line but were stopped. I heard they were on the same flight and so I calmed down a bit. Eventually, I managed to get on the plane at 10h10, five minutes before take-off. In Europe or North-America, this would have been impossible, but I should have known before that I didn't have to worry so much, because after all, this is Bolivia! After me, ten more people still got on the plane, all just too late without any reason what so ever, because this is how it works here. Lucky for me...