The Andean View

The trip to and from Quito had to be the best part of the experience. I didn't get more than a glimpse of the city while I was there, but it was okay. It was a strange sort of experience, sort of what I imagine Alaska to be like but with very different sorts of people. It is high up and the city is shaped like a banana, carved into short valley that wraps around two huge lines of mountains. And it's wet and cold, wrapped in a perpetual swath of clouds going in and out. But it has a beauty, so much of it natural and overwhelming. Inescapable.

Flying over South America, heading from the beach-strewn east coast to the craggy, forbidding Andean west was an intimidating concept before I got on the plane. But it was actually quite nice. The trip to Lima was shorter than the flight from D.C. to Los Angeles, and when the mountains appear they never stop coming. You're on top of the world the rest of the way, and you only know you're approaching Lima when the plane suddenly noses down into a thick cloud bank, under which is a large coastal port city amidst a dotting of mountains on and off the shore.

The jump to Quito is even more surreal. You head up off the runway at Lima and basically don't come down. The mountains are so high in Ecuador that as you're flying at cruising altitude above a thick layer of clouds, suddenly the snowy crest of a mountain top will pass by almost at equal height to the top of the plane.

The most breathtaking moment was on takeoff from Quito airport on my return home. The single runway at the airport faces a mountain side -- no lie -- and you take off fast and high to clear it. Once we got over the clouds, a big, glistening mountain top came into view. It had snow along one side, and a craggy shelf that swerved around it 90 degrees to another side. When I saw that the top was actually blown apart, I realized it was a dormant volcano. And the shelf had a ribbon of streams running from the melting snow cap to a big lake that was so still and clean that it looked like glass. Tens of thousands of feet up from the sea. It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

The planes I flew on were filled with a combination of Brazilian and Peruvian businessmen and European backpackers heading home through São Paulo. It was a funny kind of familiarity. Not quite the reference point of the usual folks on transcon flights in the U.S., but I felt very comfortable. I felt more Brazilian.