San José is a small but perfectly formed little airport, and being on a short haul flight I had to wait by the lower gates. This meant sitting in front of an American food concession for three hours. The chilled cabinets were full of cheese and ham croissants, chocolate and apples – all very tempting. Thanks to a typical breakfast of rice and beans I knew I wasn’t going to be hungry for at least another five hours, so had to resist.
The first flight to El Salvador was great. Taca air has an entirely new fleet of Airbuses and the flights were quite empty so they upgraded me to business. Turns out that to get to Nicaragua from Costa Rica you fly all the way over the top to El Salvador, and then fly back on the same plane, with the return leg stopping halfway in Managua.
Also different was the crew balance. In contrast to most planes I’ve been on the flight crew were entirely female and the cabin crew predominantly male. In unrelated news it was rather bumpy, a bit of a hard landing and we parked a couple of feet too far from the kerb, sorry terminal.
The flight included a 22 minute transit in San Salvador to get the return plane. I was a bit concerned this wasn’t long to get through security and immigration, but the check-in lady looked at me as if I was stupid for questioning if I’d be able to transfer in time. As it turned out it took all of 3 minutes after landing to taxi to the terminal and another 2 minutes to walk to the next gate and get on a plane without any security or checks whatsoever. Much more civilised way of flying really.
