Leaving The Flora
Morning on the Flora
Finally it was our day to leave the Flora. We put our suitcases outside our door at 7:30 and had a light breakfast before going to the lounge to hang out with our friends and do a little trivia with Lauren. She informed us the charter flight was delayed so instead of leaving at 10:45, we would be hanging out on the ship for another hour. They called us up to get our boarding passes, where we learned those of us going onto Peru would be taking a different flight to Quito and would be leaving on the first tender.
Baltra to Quito
We arrived on shore with J. R. happy to have the tender rides behind him. We had to wait around nearly 15 minutes for the bus to the airport where we received our boarding passes and learned we had a connecting flight through Guayaquil. Luckily we did not have to change seats as others in our group had to. We hustled through security and went into the VIP lounge, only to realize our plan would be boarding shortly. We stood in line for awhile and then the line disbursed and we learned there was an issue with the plane and the flight would be delayed so we went back into the lounge.
Eventually all of the other Flora guests began arriving, surprised to see us still waiting in the lounge. J. R. went up to the lounge attendant to ask for status and the woman said she the "plane has" and then said she couldn't explain well in English. J. R. said "it's broken?" and she enthusiastically said "Si!".
Luckily for us, Marta, one of the naturalists, was in the lounge ready to go on holiday. She placed a call to the ship who got in touch with landside operations and they rebooked us onto the delayed charter. This did mean we would miss our connection to Lima but she said they would get us a hotel at the airport and get us out the next day. So we got our new boarding passes and flew to Quito, arriving around 6:30.
Night in Quito
We were greeted by a Celebrity representative at the airport and taken to a bus for transport and that is where things went off the rails. He told us we would not be getting a flight to Lima until 6:45 PM the next day, meaning we would miss our day's activities in Lima. We would be allowed to keep our hotel rooms until 4PM and Celebrity had arranged an excursion to an overlook and a local craft market. Most of us groaned loudly at the idea of this shopping excursion as a very poor substitute for the trendy lunch and mixology experience we were supposed to have in Peru. The EB Hotel was very nice and we thought we would have rather stayed there than the JW Marriott downtown just to avoid the multiple hour-long bus rides into town and back.
Our boarding passes had been printed at the hotel and J. R. pointed out to the Celebrity representative that his name was spelled incorrectly. Caren had a similar problem. The representative tried to act like this was no big deal but J. R. told him it needed to be fixed. Not sure why it is so hard to type four letters correctly.
We were provided dinner at the hotel, but only one glass of wine or beer for dinner was included, which we thought was rather stingy considering the circumstances. The dinner was a special menu, which we learned was going to be the norm for our hotels. We didn't really understand why we couldn't just order off the regular hotel menus.