January 6th-7th, 2022
My flight back to Lima was around 7pm. I arrived at the small Quito airport about 3
hours before the flight since it was an international one. I had already checked in online, so I went up
to a self check-in terminal to print out a boarding pass and a tag for my
bag. For the second time on this trip, I
was able to print a tag, but no boarding pass.
I tried a few different machines to no avail, so I walked up to the lady
sitting by the entrance to the line-up for an old school check-in. She asked me for my vaccination card which I
presented. What about my “Declaration of
Health” for Peru? she asked. Damn, I
forgot about having to fill that out before arriving from Canada as that was a
few months ago. She stated that I could
do it online on Latam Airline’s website.
I searched for a few minutes then asked for her help. She opened the form and I began to fill it
out. Stupidly it required both a home
phone number and a cell one but they required a different number of digits and
my neither my Canadian nor my Peruvian numbers worked for the home number so I
had to fake it.
By the time I got the silly form done, the once empty line
up now had about 30 people in it. There
were 5-6 ticket desks in action but somehow it took an hour and 45 minutes
until I made it to a counter. The lady
was helpful but near the end of the process, she stated that I had to pay for
my checked bag. Huh? I didn’t have to pay for it on the first let
of the trip into Ecuador. So somehow I
had purchased a ticket online that only included my bag getting into the
country but not back out?!? That didn’t
make sense. Now I had to go to another
lineup to pay for the bag.
Finally, I made it to security. On a previous flight in Peru (Cusco to Lima),
I had been allowed to bring a bottle of water with me. How nice, I thought, that finally they were
getting sensible in airports instead of always having to buy a ridiculously
overpriced new bottle once you were in the secure area. This time however, my bag went through the
x-ray machine and my bottle was spotted and I was told to ditch it. What?!?
Where’s the logic in that? It’s
okay to take water through security on a domestic flight, but not an
international one?
Okay, it was just one of those days I figured. And when I have a moment like this, I just
have to remind myself to think of India.
This is totally trivial to my time being stuck there.
I had one night in Lima before catching a bus to Huaraz,
home of the big mountains of Peru. This
time in Lima I stayed at a hostel called Dragonfly, just a few buildings down
from the AirBnB I had been at when I first started my trip back at the end of
October. The logic was that it would
make it easier to leave my paraglider and extraneous clothes at the AirBnB for
the next few legs of my trip as I wouldn’t be flying in Huaraz or the Amazon
jungle. My room was on the rooftop of
the 3 storey building, an add-on after the building had been completed. It wasn’t the greatest room, but it would do
for one night.
At 5:30 in the morning, I awoke to ground shaking and the
windows rattling. It didn’t take long
for me to realize that it was an earthquake, and a pretty good one at
that. I sprung out of bed and ran out
the door, slamming it behind me. The
tremors lasted probably about 15 seconds, but it felt longer. I looked up at the high-rise buildings around
me and saw the odd light turn on. Once
things had settled down, I then realized that I might have a slight
predicament. Closing the door behind me
had locked it, and there I was standing in only my boxer shorts on a rooftop. Oh dear, am I going to have to go downstairs
in my underwear to the front desk to get let into my room? After a tiny bit of contemplation, I recalled
that I had left my window open and thankfully I was able to unlock the door.
I have to admit that it took a little while before I was
able to fall back asleep. When I got up
a few hours later, I looked online and sure enough, it was a 5.6 magnitude
located only 45 kilometres inland from Lima but the saving grace was that it
was 65 kilometres underground. I posted
about the earthquake online only for a former paragliding student to comment
back “And I thought it was the volcano that I should be worried about!”. Turns out that a volcano erupted on the north
end of Isabela Island in the Galapagos, where I was just 9 days before. It was away from civilization but and
considered not dangerous but still, it was spewing lava and smoke.
Perhaps this part of the world is telling me that it’s time
to go!
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