We almost got ourselves into trouble on our way to Ecuador.
First of all, our flight from Kansas City was so early in the morning that Pascal and I--totally brain-dead and bleary-eyed from lack of sleep--tried to board the wrong plane at the airport, which would have landed us in Houston instead of Newark for our connection. Clever, huh?
Thank God some alert gate agents pointed this out to us after I was already making my way down the boarding ramp and Pascal was getting wanded by security. We all had a good laugh over it, except I have the nagging suspicion they were laughing at us instead of with us.
This gave us time for breakfast, and Pascal left the secured area with our boarding passes to look for a good spot. What we didn´t know is that the gate agents, in our mistaken attempt to board, had kept our Kansas City --> Newark boarding passes (we only had the ones from Newark --> Quito). When Pascal tried to re-enter to come grab me, this caused quite a ruckus with all the security staff. They had to come get me to obtain the right passes, and as I´d given everything I had to Pascal it took a few confused minutes to track them down to the gate agent.
Breakfast was good, after which we had to pass through the security checkpoint once again. This would have been fine, except that while we were in line Pascal was looking at the sign that showed the list of items not allowed on the airplane (knives, guns, etc.) and proclaimed (loudly): "Hey, it doesn´t say anything about flame throwers on here! Har, har, har¨!"
I couldn´t believe it! Security agents are notorious for having zero sense of humor (especially since 9/11) and here my own brother was making wisecracks about weapons being brought on the plane! Especially after we´d already called attention to ourselves just an hour earlier.
But it gets better. Although they let that comment slide, as we were having our bags scanned and waiting for them to come out, Pascal started speaking to me in French about terrorists, which sounded (to the security agents) about like this: "Blah blah blah blah terrorist blah blah blah blah terrorist blah, ha ha ha!" I had to give him meaningful glances while still appearing casual to the security folks surrounding us for him to knock it off.
Mercifully, they let all this pass. But then I screwed it up. Obviously by then they were keeping an eye on us and when we sat down to wait for boarding Pascal started falling asleep, with his head bobbing up and down as he kept passing out. Thinking this was quite funny, I whipped out my camcorder and started filming him for posterity, not realizing that in my camera pan to film Pascal I ended up getting 1.2 seconds worth of footage of the whole security checkpoint operation.
A hefty security fellow immediately came over and questioned me. Then, he had me rewind the film and show him the footage. Satisfied that he was indeed dealing with a couple of idiots and not terrorists, he had me rewind the film to before I caught the security footage and record over it while pointing at the wall. Phew!
So they let us board the plane anyway, and we settled in our seats and immediately planned to catch a little shut-eye to make up for our ridiculously short night. Since it was sunrise and you´re not allowed to close the window shutters until after takeoff, the rising sun was glaring right at Pascal.
I didn´t notice at first, but after a minute or so I turned to look at him and saw that he´d taken his black balaclava and pulled it down over his head to block out the light. I was stunned. "Pascal, what in carnation´s name are you doing??" I asked. "You look like a [bleeping] terrorist with that thing on!!!"
He immediately took it off before anyone else took notice, and we had a good chuckle. Then, we promptly fell asleep, and neither of us remembers the plane taking off.
As it turns out, our Newark --> Quito, Ecuador flight was not a non-stop event. We landed in Bogota, Colombia about five hours after leaving Newark so all the drug dealers and smugglers could get off and then took off for the remaining one hour flight to Quito without incident.
This morning, we walked around to get a good lay of the land. At 10,000 feet, Quito is one of the highest cities in the world, and I was feeling the effects of mild altitude sickness: headache, mild nausea and dizziness, some shortness of breath, etc. And this despite taking the prescription drug Diamox to help with the acclimatization (it speeds up your breathing at so that you get more oxygen, which is what you need with the thinner air at higher altitudes until your body naturally adjusts). Unfortunately, the side-effects I´ve noticed is that it makes you want to urinate all the bloody time, and gives you constant thirst to boot--not a great combination!
I think the Diamox prescription is working better for Pascal than for me, as he´s not having any altitude symptoms. Plus, every time he sleeps his breathing gets ridiculously loud and irregular, like a dysfunctional locomotive. Obviously, he´s getting more oxygen than I am (and when you factor in the fact that his nostrils are twice as large as mine, it´s downright obvious!)
Anyway, we decided to take it easy, and hopped on a rose-colored bus to take us to El Mitad del Mundo (the middle of the earth). It was at this very spot that the exact location of the equator was determined (equator, Ecuador, get it?) and apparently the calculations involved in pinpointing this to a high degree of accuracy also gave rise to our metric system.
There´s a tall monument you can climb that sits right on the equator, but the coolest thing for me was that if you stood with one foot on either side of the yellow line representing the exact location of the equator, it´d be one of the only places on the face of the earth where you could be 100% sure that you had one foot in the northern hemisphere and the other in the southern hemisphere!
Of course, this also begs the question: if toilets flush in a clockwise direction north of the equator and in a counter-clockwise direction in the south, how do they flush right on the equator?? I´m still looking into it (not for lack of having to use restrooms, though!)
Returning to Quito, we grabbed a couple hours of sleep in our spartan, pink-walled hotel room before hitting the town.
I should point out how much better Quito looks than I´d expected. As you may have heard, a local volcano unexpectedly erupted 3 weeks ago, covering the entire city in ash and closing the airport and much of the city for over a week. I was initially concerned that this would affect our trip, but there´s very little ash left and everything looks to have settled back down to normal.
We´re off to dinner now, and if memory serves there are some good clubs around (recall that this is my second time to Ecuador, with my first trip almost causing me to lose my life when I went on a casual nature-walk in the mountains--you can read the sordid details here).
Cheers!
Gabriel
