primatesperu

"I can’t believe this is over”

Getting to the airport in Chicago, as it turns out, would be the easiest part of our day. We paid a small fortune for two baggage carts to move our five 50lb-bags of equipment from the car to the ticket counter.  On our backs we carried daypacks that contained all our clothes and the few niceties (like dental floss) we were to use for the next 9 months. It was a little rocky getting it all to the ticketing counter in O’Hare, but we made it.  Could you blame us for literally quivering with excitement? This was the beginning of what could be the greatest adventure of our lives!

“No, you cannot check in an extra bag going to Lima. Lima has never allowed excess baggage. Not since I can remember”, said the nonplussed agent from the airline-that-shall-not-be-named, “It’s perfectly clear on our website. A passenger once showed me where it says so on their laptop. I know that it’s there!”

“You’ll just have to have someone come and pick up your bag.”

We pleaded, groveled, and even got mad, and none of it worked. In a spurt of imagination we convinced them to let us take the extra bag at least as far as Houston, Texas, our stopover before Lima.

“Sure”, said she, “that’ll be $100”.

It was only 6:15am.

As I settled into my seat in the aircraft I had a sinking feeling that this day was going to be far more complicated than expected.  I brushed the notion aside – we’d figure out a way. There must be someone we could talk to! Worst case, we’d send some camping equipment back home and just do without it for a while.

In Houston, to our great relief, we found that there had been instituted, at some point in the airport’s history, a service meant exactly for passengers such as ourselves.  It allowed one, at a low cost, to mail excess baggage home rather than throw it in the trash, which realistically is the only other option.

Filled with new hope, like Democrats after February this year, we spent a second fortune on two more carts, loaded our stuff up and proceeded to the mailing service. A smiling, tubby woman, radiating reassurance and calm like only Texans can, greeted us at the door.  In breathless tones we explained our situation, worried that her eyes would glaze over in a few moments, which is usually the case with most airport officials confronted with anything out of the ordinary.

“Sure honey”, she drawled, to our surprise, ”you look like you just over packed yourselves. Come on over! We can helpya – do you have an account with us?”

I had to admit that I did not, in fact, have an account with the Houston airport mailing service in the eventuality that I would, someday, need to mail something home from there (!!). And then she said the words that I (and every other foreigner in America) dread to hear, because they are always, always followed by a huge inconvenience. “After 9/11 you know…”

“…we aren’t allowed to let you mail anything without a full background check. Otherwise anyone could just walk in and mail dangerous goods out to anyone else!”

As opposed to post-offices all over the country? Maneuvering my cart around, I knew better than to try to fight the system. Especially not in Texas.

To her credit she and her staff went out of their way to help us locate a taxi stand, a fedex office, and even weigh our bags to make sure that we were sending back the right amount of equipment. Our camping gear would just have to go. We spent a half-hour weaving through cargo facilities, and ‘gourmet’ airline pantries with an amateur taxi-driver till it was soon evident that no one knew where the heck we were. Eventually, Gid, ever helpful, noticed that the planes in the area that we’d been driving around for the last ten minutes had enormous Fedex signs plastered over their rears, a little fact that had escaped our collective notice until then.  Heading towards them, finally, we spotted the small entranceway to the office for normal people without plane-loads of materials to ship. Fifteen bucks and our camping gear was traveling blithely back to Chicago.

I glanced at my watch and noon had come and gone.

Rushing back I let Gideon fight down the price of the taxi-ride to reasonable proportions.  I was beginning to feel a little weary. My pack was heavy and worse, we were so terrified that we’d be forced to throw away even more stuff that we had to pretend that the backpacks weren’t full. I don’t think that this is something that can be quite understood by anyone that hasn’t had to negotiate Houston’s George Bush International airport with a 60lb pack on his or her back pretending like it’s full of cotton wool.

You realize with horror that there’s airport officials of one sort or another everywhere. They all begin to look like they’re looking at you. The more disconcerted you get the more distracted you get from your primary job of walking upright and not tipping over backwards. Then you reach the security counter (with the officials whose entire job it is to be suspicious of people pretending to even hold back an escapist fart) and things get worse. You try to nonchalantly lay your pack on the belt and then realize that if you don’t do all the rest of it (untie shoelaces, remove cameras, place fluids out in the open, relieve your pockets of change that has somehow crept in there) in the time it takes for the bag to pass through the scanner someone official is going to try to pick up your bag on the other side!!

Really, the stress is a bit much and it must have been visible on our faces. Both of us got flagged AFTER we’d made it past the scanner. Someone approached us and asked us to stay by the belts until they had “tested” our bags. She wiped a piece of cotton all over the bag handles and then inserted them into this big machine. Gid and I waited tensely for her answer, which eventually, was a curt “ you may go”.

We ran.

Well, as best as you can run with that much stuff.

2:30pm. One hour for brunch and then we would have to board the flight.

We wolfed down some Panda Express and made our way to gate E9. There, we had our first 20 minutes of blissful rest. In our efforts to keep the weight of our bags down we had decided to wear our large rainboots meant for the forest, and check in our sneakers instead. Several painful spots on my feet were demanding my attention. Gid was really exhausted because, as it turns out, I can carry 60lbs on my back but I cannot for the life of me lift such a bag with just my arms. At one point I stood there, tongue hitting the floor, as he, by some miraculous adrenaline rush, hoisted one 50 pounder on his shoulders and carried another by the handles to the check-in counter.  It’s safe to say his pain was greater than mine.

(It didn’t help that Fox news was on, featuring the breaking news of global significance that Obama’s next-door neighbour was moving out)

Mercifully, before some high-class American reporting further addled our brains, boarding was announced and we got in line.  We must have made quite a sight standing right next to that sign with the little model structure specifying the right size for carry-on baggage.  Even my boots were bigger than the model!

I don’t know why, exactly, but they let us on the flight. A cheerful sort of chap jumped up to help me lift my bag into the overhead compartments and within minutes reflected that same strange look we’d been displaying all morning – his knees were buckling but he was trying not to show it.  Somehow, everything fit and the plane was even able to take off. In total we had over 300lbs of equipment on it.

A minor thunderstorm had us sitting on the runway for an hour but thankfully, we didn’t have to deplane and go through the whole horrible thing all over again.

We slept in fits and starts, watching bits of movies and talking about the customs forms they were kind enough to give us 4 hours before touch down, presumably so that we could worry for three-quarters of the flight. We went through several scenarios in our heads, all the while realizing that our grasp of Spanish needed to be up to the clever story we were going to tell immigration. I spent an hour practicing conjugations of useful verbs like investigar and prometer.

By the time we landed what little was left of my nerves were straining under the effort of getting past even more bureaucracy. To our immense surprise, we sailed through immigration, and arrived in the baggage claim area to put our aching muscles to use again. Gid did his stuff and I hopped about, mostly getting in his way, and soon we had all the bags on the carts. We weaved through the crowd towards the green channel, trying to look like we always travel with this much stuff.

That was when I noticed that they had the finger-push-button system that tests the confidence with which you push a button as a proxy for whether you were lying about having nothing to declare to customs. I’d seen some of these machines before but judging by the rate at which Gid was heading towards the thing, I guessed that he hadn’t a clue what he was getting into. Our vast mountain of bags was between us and I felt strongly that I had better warn him.

“Gid!!”, I hissed, trying not to sound as panicky as I felt. “GID!”

“WHAT are you yelling me at for?!!”, he responded, and before you knew it, we were in the middle of a gorgeous spat with about 30 seconds to go before we reached the wretched button.

Gid spat out his last biting comment and turned around to face the guard with a look that could have melted steel. The guard indicated the button and he reached out, pushed it for about 1.5 seconds and, what do you know, the light went red and he was told to go towards the baggage scanners. A moment later, trembling from the adrenaline and tears that spats always bring out in me, I pushed the button for about 5 seconds (too long!!) and was also asked to join him.

Dismayed we quickly had to set our differences aside because we had to unload ALL the bags once more and load them onto yet another conveyor belt. The result was like something out of a Charlie Chaplin movie. The woman screening the bags seemed so captivated by something on her screen (and in our bags) that she stopped the belt and all the bags started to pile up at the entrance of the scanner. Then, she turned around to call out to someone and must have accidentally leaned on a button because all the bags went through the machine at top-speed and proceeded to pile up now on the other side of it. Everyone made a bee-line for their bags, gesticulating wildly. Carts crashed into each other. Both our little backpacks with our precious electronics fell off the cart onto the floor. Angry guards approached us like a swarm of bees with malicious intent until suddenly, they all fell silent.

The Big Boss had arrived. Everyone fell to explaining to him the reason for the pileup. They blamed it on our poor inanimate bags. The cowards.

Soon he was going through our heaviest bags with an ever-mounting sense of incredulity on his face.

“What”, he said, picking up a syringe with a microchip in it, “ is this?”

Stumbling and stuttering we tried to translate the purpose of the microchip into Spanish. He was not amused or comprehending.  I pulled out all my papers and tried to use those to distract him. He latched on to the one document (of about 30) that showed that we were only in the middle of an application for a permit and didn’t actually have one on us. He started to delve deeper into the bag and had almost reached the electroejaculator, a gadget the size of several stacked laptops used to retrieve sperm from anesthetized animals, when, to our immense relief (imagine translating that!) he just heaved a great big sigh .............. and gave up.

I don’t know why but he just decided to stop doing his job. In a matter of moments he went from terrifying customs official to a portly, friendly chap teasing us about our terrible Spanish. He took us over to the counter, found us a form, told us exactly what to put down, indicated a payment of $14 ($216 less than it had cost us to get our bags into Lima), and then just let us go. Just like that.

Ours is not to question why. We got the hell out of there.

It was 1:30am.

Our reserved taxi had long gone and we had to call another one over. We reached our hostel and lugged our bags up a flight of stairs into our room. A suspicious wetness on the bottom of one of the bags turned out to be an exploded bottle of hypoallergenic shampoo we bought for the tamarins. We spent the next half hour washing it off of a bunch of our stuff.

By the time we fell into bed exhausted, it was past 2:30am. We’d been up for 21 hours straight, most of which was spent carrying and pushing a lot of bags around. Somehow, we were in Peru, in a comfortable bed and not entirely broke. As I dropped off to sleep, I just couldn’t decide what to think - ought I to be glad that this was over, or was it really only just beginning?