Adventures South of the Border part one

I guess I'll just take this one from the top. I was on the midnight flight out of LAX to Mexico City, and then connecting to Cancun. I got to LAX two hours early, just as is recommended for international departures. I checked my bag in and the very nice man at the counter told me that my bag was checked all the way through Cancun. He assured me that I should not worry about clearing immigration or customs in Mexico City. He said all of that would be taken care of in Cancun. He seemed to know what he was talking about. I got in line to drop my suitcase off at the x-ray machine. It was the slowest line I've ever been in. After an hour I still wasn't to the front of the line, and wondering what in the world was the hold up. When I got closer to the front it became apparent. All the Mexicans flying back to Mexico had locks all over their suitcases. Probably every other person had to be instructed to get all the locks off their bags, and the whole line waited while that person fumbled around trying to get the combinations, or the keys, or just flat out tried to argue with the x-ray machine guy. Since I was the only white person in the line the english speaking x-ray man was overly enthusiastic to see me, and I was actually detained by him chatting with me about some suitcase he'd searched a few weeks before full of original Beatles souvenirs.

With the baggage taken care of I went off in search of the security line. It wasn't hard to find. I have never seen a line that long in an airport, and I think I've seen some pretty long lines. After waiting in this line for 20 or 30 minutes it became apparent to me I wasn't going to make my flight unless I took action. So I got out of line and went up to the front to beg security to let me cut in line. I got up there to the front and there was this Asian family standing there that apparently did not speak English. The security person was literally shouting and motioning for them to move forward in the line and they were all just standing there staring. When she saw me come up she pointed at me and said "You! You're next in line!" So it worked out well for me, and I got to my gate with time to spare.

They announced that boarding was starting and said they would be boarding everyone all at once. I thought that was sort of weird. Anyone whose ever taken a flight to Latin America you may have experienced the weird phenomena where everyone closes in on the gate all at once as though their seat may be given away if they can't board as quickly as possible. Being aware of this, and wanting no part of the shoving mass of people I held back. When I finally went through the gate I went through the door and there was no plane, only two buses. All of the people were crammed onto one of the buses, and there were still people trying to shove their way on. Right next to that bus was the another bus that looked to be identical and had maybe 6 or 7 people in it. So the choice seemed obvious. I'm still unclear as to what the attraction was with the first bus. Either way they drove us out to the plane and we boarded.

I landed in Mexico City at 5am. The landing was a little intense since the plane started to fishtail on the runway. However, we made it to the gate safely. As instructed by the guy in LAX I just went straight to the list of departing flights to find which gate I needed to report to. My flight wasn't listed, but a very nice security guy with a machine gun, who spoke english told me looked over my boarding pass, and then announced that I would need to wait about 45 minutes before it would show up, and I should just have a seat. 45 minutes later my flight shows up as departing from "Gate B." This is a problem for me because the only gates I'm seeing are A1-A25 or something. No B's in sight. I asked another security person who spoke English where I could find gate B. She was very nice and after looking at my boarding pass directed me to a gate B2 or something that I had not previously noticed. I went over there, and there were several Americans already sitting there looking kind of confused and lost. I sat down, but I was not convinced I was at the right gate. I was only there maybe 30 seconds or so when an airport person showed up to put the destination city up on the sign, Havana. Why this group of Americans were all sitting at a gate for a flight to Cuba wasn't really adding up. So I got up and approached yet another security person. I again inquired as to the location of gate B. This time the person pointed down to the end of the wall where there were 3 or 4 men with machine guns blocking the hallway. He told me gate B was beyond that security checkpoint, but the only way the machine gun guys were going to let me through is if I had already gone through immigration.

I hurried and got in the immigration line which was now pretty long. I spotted several other people in line behind me from my flight, so I suspect they also had received weird directions about where to go too. I did not clear immigration in time to catch my flight. So I reported to gate B, only to find out that gate B is in fact only a counter, not an actual gate. It's where they have you report if you're flight is going to get a last minute gate assignment. The guy at the counter was very nice, and switched me over to the next flight departing in an hour. He sent me downstairs with some instructions to go to gate B15 and ask the people there to assist with rerouting my luggage. I got that taken care of, and returned to gate B to await the gate assignment for my new flight.

The new assignment came through for A6 or something. Having become acquainted with the A gates earlier in the morning I realized that those are for international departures, and also would require me to go back past the security checkpoint (x-ray machine and metal detectors), so I made the guy behind the counter confirm that it was in fact departing out of gate A6. I walked all the way back down to A6, which was kind of a walk. I got to that gate and it actually was the right gate, so I sat down to wait for boarding. I was sitting for no more than 5 minutes when someone came and made an announcement in Spanish, and only in Spanish (fortunately my spanish comprehension is just good enough to decipher what was going on), that the flight had been cancelled, but that there was another flight that would be departing in just a few minutes. Seats were limited so if you wanted to get on that flight you needed to report immediately to gate B15. So myself and the Mexicans, got up and hustled off leaving a bunch of Americans sitting there not knowing what was going on.

I went back through the security checkpoint, and got to B15, but it turns out that the flight was not departing from B15, they were just assigning new tickets at B15. I got assigned to the new flight which was departing out of gate B25 or something. I went directly to B25, where they informed me that the flight had been delayed 30 minutes. At this point I was wondering if my vacation was going to consist of a week of me walking back and forth from one gate to another in the Mexico City airport. I did end up flying to Cancun on that flight. The flight itself was kind of exciting. We hit some pretty severe turbulence. The plane was taking huge drops, and a guy in front of me was sitting in his seat with his hands above his head like he was on a roller coaster. The plane sort of bounced along on the runway during the landing. Needless to say I wasn't overly impressed with the pilots for Mexicana Airlines.

Miraculously enough, my luggage actually arrived with me in Cancun. I have no idea how that happened. I had no expectation that it was going to be successfully routed through all those flight changes. I was pretty excited about being reunited with it in such a timely fashion. More to come...