Our last morning of our holiday and first we waited for our guides to give them our tip, which I had missed last night. Carlos and Ebony were travelling back to Puno with them so we had a chance to say a jealous happy travelling. We then walked to the witches market, along the way passing some bars which had obviously seen some Saturday night action judging by the pools of blood outside. We got to the market area before the market owners and had to wait a while for anything to open but this was our last chance to buy tat before going home and we were determined to make use of it. All that remained once this was over was to jump in a taxis with Jill and Russell to the airport and check in.

Check in seemed to be smooth and we got our three boarding cards for the three flights we were taking, La Paz to Lima, Lima to Madrid and then finally Madrid to London. Our bags were checked through all the way to the end and we were just beginning to think that perhaps this LAN air was actually a bit better than we had given them credit for when we noticed that the time on the middle flights was 5 hours later than we expected. This presented the problem that if correct we would land in Madrid after the plane for London had taken off. With a sinking feeling I went back to the desk to try and explain the possibility that this would not work and it took ten minutes to get them to acknowledge there might be a problem but advised us to talk to the desk when we got to Lima. Furious we sat back down and then remembered our bags which were checked onto flights they could not possibly get and went back to the desk. Here it was with some disbelief that I had to go through the entire 10 minute conversation about how our bags would have the same problem we would have but eventually the light bulb turned on and they offered to pull the bags at Lima for us to pick up. Luckily Jill and Russell were flying with BA from Lima and so could sit back in the sure and safe knowledge that their flights would be there, at the time they were supposed to be.

At Lima my blood pressure reached 'hopping mad' levels as we were told that our confirmed flights had been rescheduled without notice and yes, our connection was a problem. What was worse was that we wold now be arriving in Madrid at the end of a bank holiday weekend and there were no flights to London until late the next day. We filled out a complaint form for the sake of it but the person taking it just shook here head at our naivety and told us to not expect much. We bumped into a guy who flies this route regularly and he did not seem surprised by the chaos and told us where the nearest free Internet was to email work about the delay. With a  plane full of angry people arriving at Madrid there was something of a scrum to get on the small bus to the hotel which had to do a lot of shuttle runs, one fellow Brit sadly declared the scene as 'something from a zoo'. The hotel seemed well set up for this type of emergency and a free bottle of wine was included with the evening meal to ease the pain.