Going Back In Time And Losing Sleep

There’s nothing like a long haul flight to make you appreciate what a natural and biological process sleep is.

No matter what, you just can’t cheat sleep.

When we arrived in Santiago, we stuck to our plan: do not lie on the bed.

Our flight was weird, we left Auckland on the 19th November at 18.40.

We arrived in Santiago, after 11 hours flying, on the 19th November at around 13.30 🤯

Groundhog Day.

After a broken sleep, we committed to staying awake. In Vietnam we’d let the jet lag control us, but not this time!!

We did everything “right”.

– we adjusted our sleep schedule in Auckland adjusting the alarm by 30-60 minutes each day

– in Santiago we got out in the sun to help the ol’ circadian rhythm

– we didn’t sleep in the day, we went out, got the SIM card, did the shopping. We even unpacked some stuff!

Finally, the sweet, sweet relief of 9pm.

Exhausted, it took no time for us to be flat out asleep.

You’d think we’d get a solid 10 hours and spring out of bed in our new time zone.

Nope.

That’s not what happened.

1am rolled around and we both stirred.

Both awake, both starving.

What?!

1am Chile is 4am Auckland time and we NEVER woke that early! What was going on?!

Well, our bodies were fully awake so we had tea in bed with toast and peanut butter followed by fruits and yoghurt.

We turned to Netflix to get us through the early hours and started Line of Duty (a British TV cop drama, love it)! We watched basically a series that morning lol

Around 5-6am we started to feel tired again so we went back to sleep, forcing ourselves awake at 8am so we could start the day.

We had two mornings like this. By the third or fourth morning we were pretty much in sync with Chile time but not quite firing on all cylinders.

Isn’t it weird how sleep works?

To be honest, I loved those jetlagged mornings in Santiago with Stew. It was really cosy, slow mornings and a nice vibe. I’m quite fond of the memory already 🥰

So, jetlag, got any tips?

I think we did pretty well this time around compared to Vietnam where I booked a 5* hotel and we just slept in it 😂 I had no idea how bad jetlag was when I booked that hotel.