Quito Ecuador

July 5, 2000

Quito, Ecuador

After 12 hours on 3 different planes, I peered out the darkened window to see Quito looking back through the clouds. From the sky it looked like any other city at night, strings of streetlights marking the neighborhoods, cars whizzing along the shadowed streets and rows of sleeping buildings silhouetted in moonlight.

My heart beat fast as I surveyed the city from the sky, my mind racing through all the decisions I had made to arrive at this lofty view point, second guessing my ability and sanity. I felt a twinge of fear grip my stomach and began to tighten the forming knot as the plane gently banked, lifting me towards the sky. Three months... three months in South America... what have I gotten myself into. I'm half a world away in a country filled with people who speak a different language and live a different lifestyle. Strangers... I will be surrounded by strangers who I can't even talk to... people of a different color, race and creed.

Taking a deep breath, I relaxed my tightly sealed eyes and looked once again to the window. A soft beam of moonlight shone through bathing me in its glow. There it was... the same moon that looked down on me so many nights before. It had watched me grow from a boy to a man, followed me from one side of the states to the other. That moon was here, much to my relief, looking down on me once again, following me to a distant land. That moon had followed me to Ecuador.

Slowly the knot loosened in my stomach and my heart slipped out of high gear. I began to realize these people were not so strange, this land not so far to miss the splendor of my moonlight.

The plane set down with a jolt somewhat reminiscent of the turbulence over Panama, which had provoked screams of fright and an admonition to keep our seatbelts fastened. This jolt, however, received a round of applause from a none-too-patient compliment of passengers anxious to be on their way.

As we climbed out of the plane we were bathed with the now familiar smell of oily automobile fumes that permeate the cities in Ecuador. Ecuadorians are some of the poorest people in South America and have little spare cash to replace their tired, abused cars so they drive them until they will move no more. This was evident after stepping into the dilapidated taxi, which ran us at breakneck speed through the night to our first stop, the hostel, Posada Del Maple. The driver reluctantly removed his hand from the horn and hopped out of his tiny, beat-up 60's Datsun sedan. 40,000 Sucre later, we were escorted to an iron gate which bars entry to the hostel and just about everything else surrounded by a concrete wall topped with broken glass in town.

We climbed the three flights of stairs to arrive at our slightly headroom challenged habitacione. Winded from the stairs, it dawned on me that we were now at 10,000 feet and I might have to acclimate for a day or two so I vowed to Rebecca, no aerobics for at least a week. Rebecca (trying to figure out how to drink from her hydration pack) ignored me.

After a semi-restful night's sleep we awoke to a semi-operational shower. As is the case in most of the hostels/homes in Quito, the reliability of the hot water heaters are always in question.

One thing that is not in question is the availability of Internet cafes. To my delight I found a fully functional Internet cafe right in the hostel. With Pavlovian grin I dove right in for the obligatory "we made it" e-mails. Not a second after I had completed my last entry did our South American teacher/mountain guide/historian, Washington Villanova press the buzzer at the gate.

We were surreptitiously rushed off to Otavalo for Spanish lessons at three