Originally Posted by
mvoight
Regarding another poster's comment about what happens if there is an irrop and you have to stay over 24 hours. Surely irrops of affect people traveling to "third" countries to. I am quite sure the Russian government people at DME understand that sometimes transit will be delayed over 24 hours.
A few years ago flying SCL (Santiago de Chile) to EZE (Buenos Aires) our Varig flight diverted to Porto Alegre, Brazil due to severe weather/wind shear at EZE. I had no Brazilian visa. Didn't seem to matter too much because immigration was closed at the airport due to the hour and Varig just had us walk on through and on to their charter busses. They put us up at a nice Holiday Inn, fed us, then took us back to the airport in the morning. My fun began when I attempted to
leave Brazil in Sao Paulo. I ended up getting Varig passenger services involved and a clearance from the commander of immigration at the airport to get the OK to leave (since Brazil does a passport check outbound as well as inbound). I wrote this adventure up as a trip report which can be found in the Flyertalk trip report archives.