Puck's Adventure

Well, he did it. Our cat Puck is now a world traveller. After enduring a never-ending 16 hour car ride from Florida to Maryland, another 3 hour trip from Maryland to New Jersey and back again all in a month’s time, he flew from Baltimore to Chile today, officially earning his stripes as an international cat.

Yes, I know I’m already making the first stereotypical blog faux pas, writing about my cat, but the fact of the matter is, our trip to Chile was pretty much dominated by trying to keep him feeling relatively safe and happy - mostly for our own sanity. Along the way we learned something fairly interesting about Chilean bureaucracy.

Checking Puck in and getting from BWI in Maryland to Atlanta was a breeze. We paid the pet fee ($100) carried him through security, and boarded the plane with no problem. Honestly, he didn’t make a peep the whole trip, mostly because he was scared to death. Our first flight was delayed and we just barely made our connecting flight to Santiago. This sort of screwed up our master plan to let him run around for a bit in the bathroom between flights, but we didn’t have a choice.

We were seated next to a couple with a baby for our long (10 hour) international flight. We were perfectly happy about this. Any smells or noises could easily be attributed to the baby, keeping us out of trouble with our fellow passengers. Surprisingly, the parents of said child were very good ones, they rigged up an ingenious hammock for the baby using a blanket stuffed into a magazine holder on the bulkhead and managed to keep their child happy, quiet, and clean. Apparently, we are also good “cat parents” because Puck was also fairly quiet and clean (I can’t say much about happy - he looked pretty mad the whole trip).

The only bad part about this leg of the trip was the “premium” cat carrier we purchased from Sherpa. With some “help” from Puck, the zipper separated from the bag creating a rather large hole that we couldn’t patch. Puck “discovered” and exploited this hole within three seconds. He rabbit kicked the top of the carrier, making the hole larger and larger until he could almost stick his entire head through. At this point, we were faced with the possibility that Puck would destroy the whole top of the bag and escape creating a “CATS on a PLANE” type panic that only Samuel L. Jackson could verbalize.

Puck and his "premium" bag

Keeping the panic out of my voice, I told the flight attendant that one of our bags had ripped and we’d like some tape. On a good day, she would have brought some duct tape; on this day she came back with masking tape. We grabbed the carrier, ran into the bathroom and began furiously taping around the entire bag, sealing up Puck’s only means of escape. We couldn’t close the hole, but we could keep him from popping his head out, which was good enough for us. After sealing off the hole, he pretty much resigned himself to the situation and settled down to sleep. Hours (and hours and hours) later, we arrived in Santiago.

Masking tape saves the day!

Getting Puck through customs was pretty much a breeze; I just handed over 20 different official looking documents, which made them feel that all was well and they let him into the country. Hilariously, while they were OK about allowing our live animal through customs, they were pretty unmoving about his dry cat food, which they seized with relish.

At this point, we felt that the hardest part was done. Little did we know that our frustration was just beginning. We went up to the LAN desk (Chile’s main airline) to check in for our short (1 hour) hop from Santiago to La Serena and were almost immediately issued boarding passes. However, when we mentioned our cat, we were told by a helpful agent that we needed to pay for him in a different area. We walked over to the payment desk, where another very helpful man took our $35 and filled out a dizzying array of computer forms for ~45 minutes, only to hand us a small, 4 inch X 8 inch pass for Puck.

We walked back to the first desk to check him in and were met by confused looks by a bevy of agents - no less than three separate confused looks per person. After an aborted attempt to load him as checked baggage (NO!) managers came over to explain to us that they DO NOT allow animals as hand luggage. This came as quite a surprise to us, given that we called no fewer than 4 times to confirm Puck’s “reservation” and had asked each time (to be sure) that we could bring him on the plane. Apparently, the rules had changed September 1st, someone had screwed up when we made our reservations, and now, we had a serious situation on our hands.

The managers seemed very willing to help. I took this as a good sign. This is when we slowly started to learn a bit about Chilean bureaucracy. We waited at the ticketing desk for about an hour, watching as two shift changes at the desk took place. No one spoke with us. No one assured us that the problem was handled. I would try to ask for help every so often, only to be met with a very helpful “Let me find my manager”, a dutiful call on a walkie-talkie, a complete inability to locate anyone in charge, and a shrug of the shoulders. Another hour of this and I was starting to get fairly frustrated.

Managers finally started approaching. Unfortunately, every single manager had a different story of what they were going to do for us. One was going to put Puck in a hard-sided carrier under the plane. Another was going to tape off a section of the aircraft for us. It sunk in that none of these people were really planning on solving our problem.

Finally, we were told that we would be on the next flight to La Serena, that they would find a cage for Puck to put him under the plane, that we would get boarding passes when check-in for the flight “closed”, and that someone would come to get us and escort us to the gate. At the appointed time, not a single manager was around. No one came to get us. I took things into my own hands, walking up to each desk, demanding to see a manager. 10 minutes after the situation was supposed to be “handled”, a manager appeared, ticketed us and told us to go to gate 21 with our cat and board the plan. What??!!

At this point, the flight was almost done boarding. We were still at the ticket ing desk. We sprinted through security, flying passed in about 1 minute. No one blinked at us as we sloppily made our way through the metal detectors with the cat. We ran to gate 21. It was the wrong gate!!! We sprinted to a monitor and found the correct gate, arriving right before the flight closed. No one asked for a pass for Puck, no one even noticed our existence. We found our seat and arrived in La Serena, tired but victorious, 1 hour later.

Throughout the process, I got the overall feeling that the airline staff thought we would just “go away”; admit defeat, take the cat and rent a car or something to get to La Serena. I don’t know if they were surprised with my persistence, they all seemed completely flummoxed by the fact that we didn’t disappear. The solution to the problem was, at the end of the day, no different from what was planned in the first place, but we had to endure 3 hours of bureaucracy to make it happen. Furthermore, we both got the sneaking suspicion that the managers REALLY didn’t want us to make that flight, hence the last minute tickets and the incorrect gate information.

The most interesting lesson that we learned was that if we had just kept the cat’s existence to ourselves, we probably could have boarded our initial flight with no problem; the security people and flight crew couldn’t have cared less; only the front desk managers had a problem; it’s almost as if they created a major situation and they ran around trying to solve it to give themselves something to do. Something to think about in the future!

Overall, the trip was a success. We got here with all of our belongings and our cat. Henry, a very nice Gemini scientist who I met during my interview trip, picked us up from the airport and took us to our new temporary apartment/hotel. Puck immediately got into trouble, finding a hiding place in the gas oven (we blocked that off as soon as we lured him out) and discovering an open window in the bathroom that we hadn’t noticed. After Puck-proofing the place we crashed, ending our first part of our first day in Chile.