30th December 2016
I am writing this from the Hostel Imperial in Ecuador, right in the part called Mariscal. I am sitting in the garden, watching some kids play soccer.
Well, where should I start? It has been an extremely busy time before we finally got here and I can tell you that once we arrived it all that stuff vanished pretty much. We both have to get used to that we do not have appointments, schedules, meetings whatever.
The things we needed to fix at home before we left were so time-consuming that we actually did not have time to prepare the trip. We barely managed to book our hotel 25th of December.
We had to find renters for our apartment, find places for our cats to stay 3 month (without major costs and without being worried), get all kinds of stuff done, pack our personal belongings, clean our house, pack the car, spend time with family for Christmas, buy presents – it has been quite race. The race ended and there are still things we need to do and some unexpected stuff crossed our way: I forgot that our car needs to be checked and the Dutch IRS wrote a letter they want to check our administration during our trip.
The two biggest things we wanted to finish properly were our two projects we were working on. I wanted to finish the last growth experiments and Tanja wanted to get the display campaign working. Well, it both happened although maybe we would have wanted some more time but the thing about going on a big trip is that there is never a good time.
To combat that Tanja just surprised me with a birthday present: she booked the flights and the date was set: 29th of December 2016 we are boarding the United airlines Boing 777. And here we are: Quito, Ecuador.
We are part of the rat race at home. Big time. Not only do we operate the webshop www.nutur.nl – we also do a lot of consultancy work under the label Growth Hacking Rockstars. I can tell you we live like what the French call Métro, ballot, dodo which translates to Subway, Work, Sleep. For us, it would be more like Fiesta, Werk, Slap (Bike, Work, Sleep). At least we get the exercise in two times a day. The Japanese have a special word for people who work until they drop dead: Karōshi. It kind of felt this way the last three years for us. We worked non-stop with no real vacation. Sitting behind our notebooks all the time. It was time for a big break.
So we headed to the airport early morning 29th of December. We spend the two days before departure working and finishing up our projects. We packed our bags late afternoon 28th. Kind of last minute but we were not planning to take much as our plan is to travel through 3 countries in three months and that means the less you take the lighter the journey will be. As we are traveling with a baby we do have additional language anyhow that means less space for us. You can expect a 16-month-old to carry her own backpack across South America, can you?
The trip started kind of in a mixed mood as Anaïs had diarrhea early that morning and it wasn’t great fun cleaning her and showering her in between the airport rush. We also stayed at a friends place as we rented out our apartment already the 24th of December and as every parent knows it is double the work if you need to search for stuff in child emergency situations. We managed to get to the airport in time, with passport and all bags. We boarded a nice flight of United Airlines – a huge airplane and thank god we had made a phone call during Christmas and united gave us great seats with room for a toddler bed. Those hanging things are just fantastic especially when you are on a long haul flight. The flight itself was pretty uneventful besides Anaïs having a lot of problems with her guts and we were rushing through the diapers in no time. The family next to us was so kind to donate diapers. I think we used to like more than 12 diapers during the flight.
We met an expat family who was living in Houston during the flight and they had a small baby boy as well. Anaïs and the other children behaved really good during the flight, No long crying, no long periods of noise or annoyance. I did see some grumpy faces but it was hard to judge if they were because of us (of course we moved a lot, changed seats, used the bathrooms much more often) or just because it is such an exhausting flight of 12 hours. We had a great time and Anaïs did really great considering that she had a virus that fucked up her stomach and intestines which caused a tsunami coming out of her bottom. What I liked most about the whole flight was her sleeping like an angel on my chest strapped in a baby carrier.
We landed at Houston airport and going through all the ESTA, customs and security checks wasn’t great fun at all as Anaïs continued to have situations down in her pants. She also had red checks which helped us through customs as the kind of had a pity with us and wanted us to pass through. I would not recommend avoiding a stopover at any US airport if you are traveling with small children. The US customs and boarder security makes transferring a time-consuming & painfull process. I kind of does not understand why the US does not let transferring passengers just transfer quickly and maximize shopping time instead of maximizing fingerprinting time. Why would they take your fingerprints 2 times in like 20 minutes? First, we had to scan our own fingers ourselves at an ESTA machine and then we had to get fingerprinted again shortly after by a real person. Well, all in all, it left us no time to do even simple shopping like food and we would probably buy more things for our trip but we needed to rush to our next plane.
The second flight from Houston to Quito, Anaïs did really good. She slept all the time. Sometimes we had those mixed parents feelings like what have we done to her booking a 20-hour journey. All in all, she did really, really well. there was not one time she cried even when the air pressure was popping your ears during taking off and landing. There is a thing about airplane seats and small children. They just love to play with the people seated behind you playing hide and seek and Anais and the made many people smile with their innocent child behaviors.
Think flying is always fun. I generally like observing people and during long flights you got a lot of time watching people around you. You got the elderly most likely retired people, the middle management business travelers who have to fly economy, the families and all those people have different occasions for their travel. Some are moving out of their home country and some are just returning. You got the happy vacation folks and of course, the must fly business people easily recognizable by their laptop gears and excel spreadsheet work during flights. During our Quito flight, there was one of those business guys, working on spreadsheets on his laptop, watching an onboard movie, watching a ski instruction movie, playing candy crush on his tablet and the guy had three phones (one which was a blackberry -0 yes they do exist).
There is always a passive aggressive friction between those groups on flights. The business travelers think they deserve a place in business class but a banned by their bad boss in economy class. The families are worried that their kids will make it a terror flight for everybody else and try to keep the children calm by the slightest sign of things going high volume. The vacationers just want to have a good time and aim for serenity also in-between groups. We got it all on this flight to Houston Texas.
Our flight to Quito was much different. Tanja expected chicken baskets in the overhead compartments but wasn’t that bad. Many people took their luggage into the cabin to avoid extra costs. The crowd of the Amsterdam flight was a mix of US and Dutch medium age maybe 35, the passengers on the Quito flight were much younger and gave us a taste what Quito would be like. There was a great amount of Ecuadorians on the flight with a mix of the backpacker crowd and families and US tourists.
After leaving Amsterdam 29th at 7 am we arrived at Quito airport a short 20 hours later. We got picked up by a married couple who happen to be the daughter and son in law of the hostel owner where we are staying. I was glad that Tanja freshened up her Spanish in the weeks before we left, she can speak a fair amount of Spanish and understands a lot. At least a lot more than myself. I was jetlagged, tired, exhausted and could not even think straight. Plus the plane dropped us on a huge mountain 3000 meters above sea level. Just imagine: we live 8 meters below sea level. The last time I saw a mountain was during a half a decade ski vacation in Winterberg (the place were all crazy Dutch go skiing).
Already during the car ride, I was gasping for air. The air is much thinner in Quito of course. The first thing we saw from Quito were a great amount of lights far in the distance 1 am in the morning. We arrived at the hostel Imperial right in the fun part of town. The hostel is painted colorful red and is surrounded by backpacker places, bars, cafe’s, restaurants and tourist shops. It is a really nice area to stay. Our hostel is not located anywhere near noise factors like a large discotheque. The guy checking us in, family of the owner, gave us a great room suited for 4 persons.
We went to bed straight away, we were exhausted from the trip.