Getting There

I started reading Paul Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express, which opens with a rant about how annoying it is that all travel narrative only begins once the destination has already been reached, when often the journey there is equally as good a story. Inspired by this, I though I'd share a bit of our dilapidated first steps toward overseas adventuring.

My parents drove us up to NYC so we could easily catch our flight out of JFK the next day, since it left early in the morning and we needed to be there two hours earlier. They told us they'd wake us up about half an hour before the shuttle to the airport left, so we could say our goodbyes and all that. Peter set an alarm in our room just in case, and in the morning we were woken up by scratchy music playing out of the hotel's clock radio. We lay around for a while waiting for my parents to come knock on the door, but since we only had a few minutes to get ready we decided to pack up our stuff. No knock. With five minutes to go before the shuttle left, we went across the hall and knocked on their door, but there was no answer. I started banging on the door, and finally there were sounds of smashing around and bumping things over inside their room. A minute later, two very disheveled and sleepy parents opened the door (pretty sheepishly), having forgotten to wake up at all. Luckily, we had time to say goodbye before sprinting off to catch our shuttle.

We arrived at JFK, and already in the LAN check-in line we stuck out. Most of the people on the two a.m. flights to were South Americans going home or to visit family. One man in line in front of us leaned over to ask us about where we were going, and when we said we were headed to Quito, told us it was really cold there this time of year. This was pretty odd to hear coming from anyone who had been in snow-covered New York. We also had about 1/8 the amount of luggage as everyone else, and Peter had to help the family in front of us push a couple of their bags forward every time as we moved through the line.

The actual flight was quite comfortable. The woman at the check-in counter had obviously noted Peter's rather unusual size and given us seats in the central exit row, so we had all the leg room and none of the responsibility. We also got reasonably edible food, and it felt like flying about 10 years ago. We got to Guayaquil, which was hot and sticky even inside the airport, where we had to wait about 4 hours until our "connecting" flight to Quito. We wandered around outside a little bit, but it was too much of a shock, coming from the snow, to really want to be outside too long. Instead we entertained ourselves by playing games inside, while goofy covers of U2 and the Backstreet Boys serenaded us.

We finally made it to Quito and to the Mariscal, the neighborhood our hostel was in, without a hitch (didn't even have to argue with the taxi driver!). About a block away from the hostel our taxi driver tried to turn the wrong way down a one way street, and on the corner some guy was peeing in the street while his friend pulled on his arm trying to make him stop and a cop looked at him somewhat disapprovingly. Getting to our hostel after that was easy, and after getting settled, we did what any good Americans would do after a long day--went out for burgers, with aji on top.