Comin' Home Baby. Am comin' home.

All good things come to an end, and so did my my trip to Ecuador.

The evening before my pre-dawn departure, I settled my bill at the hotel and asked them to arrange for a taxi to the airport, and headed out for one final stroll along the major thoroughfares of Centro Historico.  One last walk up to Plaza Grande.

The graffiti-art murals there caught my attention, yet again.  I knew I would never see anything like this in America.  Imagine such a mural by the White House at Washington, DC!

I took in as much of the sights and sounds as I could.  Because, I knew that I might never ever visit Ecuador again in my life.  There are so many other places I want to get to within my limited budget and re-visiting is an unaffordable luxury.

On my way back to Hotel Real Audencia, I stopped at the store two blocks away to get a couple of guavas.  The store was crowded, as it was during my two other ventures there.  I carefully selected two guavas--one ripe, and the other semi-ripe and much firmer than the other.

Even the express checkout line was long.  The lady behind me had a couple of bags of strange looking meat, which made me think about the Ecuadorian specialty of guinea pig. "Could this be?" I thought to myself.

It was now my turn at the counter.  The young woman's eyes were red, perhaps from the long and strenuous hours at work.  She probably can not even afford dreaming about the comforts that I take for granted in my everyday life.  "If I were a rich man" as Tevye sings in The Fiddler on the Roof, I might have just about emptied my wallet for her to go on a vacation. 

As I walked past the front desk at the hotel, I reminded them about the taxi for 4:30 in the morning, and for a wake-up call at 4:00.

"Don't worry. It will be here."

I slowly climbed up the two flights for one final time.

My phone's alarm woke me up a minute before the wake-up call ring reverberated in the room.  After a shower and getting ready for the long flight back to Oregon, I sat at the table and picked up a blank piece of paper.

"Sra/Srta, gracias para servicio" I wrote on the paper.  And placed on top of that paper two small packs of Trader Joe's chocolate bars, which are faithful travel companions of mine.  I hoped that the housekeeping women would enjoy them.

When I got into the plane, my mind seemed to be filled with equal parts of regret over the end of a wonderful vacation, relief that the stress of being alone in an alien land was over, and joys of going back home. 

Rudyard Kipling remarked that we are not able to call the entire world our home “since man's heart is small”.  Kipling, too, was a product of globalization—he was born in India to British parents, and spent his early childhood in Bombay (now Mumbai), which he described as “mother of cities to me.” Of all the places he had been to, Kipling felt that one place was special. He wrote about that in a poem entitled “Sussex”:

Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
Yea, Sussex by the sea!

As much as Kipling treasured his corner in England, I too rejoice in the fact that America is my home.  It is ever with an excited heart that I walk through immigration and customs when I return.  This time, it was at Miami, just as it was in 1988 when our group returned from Venezuela.  A lot of water under the bridge over the twenty-three years since that first South American trip, and the twenty-four years since I came to America as a graduate student.

From the little I have traveled, there has been nothing to even remotely lure me away from America.  Not even from Oregon, it looks like.

As the plane took off from Miami, and I was on my way back to Oregon, I realized how much more familiar Ecuadors' hills and green felt compared to the concrete jungles down below.  I wanted to do a Pope John Paul act of kissing the ground when I reached Eugene--my own Sussex.  At least, for now.

Until my next trip!