More good stuff in Nicaragua

We came away from Little Corn feeling it was one of the best places we had ever been and one of the nicest weeks, even though we had had the most atrocious weather imaginable - the place is that cool. When we got back to Managua airport we had a mission with the American Airlines desk there.

You see a few week prior we had tried to confirm all our flight dates. We had requested all our open dates by email with Finnair but we had got a few nasty suprises. We could only get wait-listed to and from New Caledonia, we couldn´t get any flights before November between Rio and Santiago, and worse, Costa Rica (San Juan) to Puerto Rico (San Jose) did not exist; American Airlines did not have the route. This was very confusing and annoying for us as we had a blank ticket for the flight. Finnair told us the route was scheduled to start in the future - which didn´t do us any favours as we were holding a ticket for a plane that didn´t fly. We would have uncovered this mistake if we had booked dummy dates for all our flights but we had also presumed that our rep had checked when we said we would probably fly this one on July 17th.

Anyway, we came up with the plan to ditch the Rio-Santiago flight and use that segment to fly via Miami to Puerto Rico. The big change being that we would have to make it overland around all of Peru, Bolivia, Brasil, Argentina and to Chile. The other issue was that, by the terms of our round-the-world ticket we would have to fork out 125eur each for a route change and ticket reissue.

The AA lady at Managua airport was veru sympathetic, said they knew nothing about flying one day direct from San Jose to San Juan, and started making the necessary arrangements. After faxing, photographing and emailing our tickets to HQ in Mexico and about 4 hours of faffing, she had nailed all our flights (including settling a duplicatation of New Caledonia flights that Finnair had missed), got all the dates confirmed and then announced that we would have to pay... nada. It was all free. Whether be oversight, sympathy or fortune we didn´t even have to pay additional taxes and avoided any charge and reissue fee - and some airlines (Quantas) charge 15usd for every date faff.

For the Deli tour completists, and those still considering joining us (there must be some you left out there) I will put the dates here shortly...