An informal account of our informal tour of Ecuador
DAY 0 – June 10, 2005
As a rule, I no longer write very
much regarding my experiences with commercial aviation.
There just isn’t that much to say that would be of interest to any but
the eight remaining Americans who have not yet experienced commercial air
travel. Crying babies and tiny bags
of peanuts are the same from one traveling experience to the next.
There is much unpleasantness but little novelty to be found in air travel
– until one visits a few third-world airports.
Quito’s Mariscal Sucre International has some hints of modernity in its
modern building materials, its curving partitions of stainless steel and blonde
woods, but don’t be fooled. One
need only experience baggage claim to have all such illusions exploded.
Quito’s is a smallish airport, so
the baggage handlers have a very short trip to make between cargo hold and the
exterior portions of the four baggage carousels.
In virtually every baggage claim experience I have had, the bags just
miraculously appear from behind black rubber strips.
For all the passengers know, a crew of magical elves is at work gently
placing luggage onto the conveyor. In
Quito, the ugly truth is all to clear. The
entire exterior wall is glass, and the baggage crew is clearly visible just a
few yards away, flinging suitcases in the general direction of the belt like so
many unwanted sacks of grain. After
seeing this, I will never be able to understand why anyone would buy
expensive luggage.
These observations became less
absorbing when the sickening realization clutched at my heart.
Daisy’s backpack was not to be found.
The handlers pitched the last of their ballast onto the conveyor, and the
crew’s foreman looked up, saw the desperation in my eyes, and with the gesture
of a very somber baseball umpire gesturing “safe,” indicated to me that
there were no mas. Bad.
Very bad. Bad in so many
ways.
Having had some limited experience
with lost bags, I knew that the next step would be to check with an airline
representative who would establish the bag’s location on their computer system
and give me an idea as to when to expect it.
I was not encouraged to find that at the Continental kiosk there in
Quito, the representative has a blank span of formica where the computer monitor
ought to be. This did not bode
well. The best he could do was fill
out a form, give us the carbon duplicate, and invite us to wait 25 minutes for
the next flight from Houston to arrive, as perhaps the backpack had somehow
found its way into the belly of the wrong plane.
This next flight must have been one of the new airbus superjets, as the luggage quickly overwhelmed luggage carousel #2. Suitcases were hanging up on every bend, refusing to move. The ensuing logjams gained strength, and soon samsonites were committing suicide over both sides of the belt. It looked exactly like what would have happened had Lucy Ricardo ever been placed in charge of unloading a baggage carousel. The Ecuadorian staff did not seem ruffled by this development, making me assume that this was not the first such occurrence. They did, however, leap into action by starting up the adjacent carousel #1. All of three minutes were needed before this conveyor met the fate of its neighbor. The baggage carnage was now irredeemably widespread. If you have seen PBS footage of Arctic spring thaws, in which flat sheets of snowy ice quickly become ragged moonscapes of icy trapezoids and monoliths, then you have some idea of what was happening here in Ecuador’s capitol. The mess became messier, then, since baggage claim had lost that which makes it worthy of the name – the ability to show luggage to a very large and stationary group of people spread over a reasonably large area. Now the bags were stationary, and the passengers naturally moved toward their desired belongings. Let us close this painful scene, noting only that we departed Mariscal Sucre over 90 minutes late, one bag short, and with tears in Daisy’s eyes. There is nothing like travel to build character.