Hola Loja

After a delightful and unexpected yoga session in the Guayaquil airport (empty room with bamboo plants...needed to stretch my creaky bones and something about it just said 'ohm') I was finally aboard my freshly booked flight to Loja where Dany and Jorge were waiting for me.

It seemed like we had just taken off when we started to make our descent. It had been almost a year since I'd seen these immense mountains shooting out of an absurdly green valley but this was a geography I had not forgotten. Down to the leaves blowing in the wake of our landing. And just like that it was like I had never left. In the one room arrivals area, I saw Jorge and Dany on the other side of the doors, where they had to wait. I immediately began flailing like the wacky-waving-inflatable-arm-flailing-tubemen. Short of running through the plastic flaps separating the luggage loaders from the luggage grabbers, I was the first person near the bags and when I had them with me, I ran over probably 3 people and knocked the wind out of a guard with my big roller bag but it didn't matter because I was about to give much awaited hugs to some of my best friends--not just in Ecuador--but on this whole planet. It felt surreal. The air, which for the past 24 hours had been of the gross recycled airport variety, even felt more vibrant and contributed further to the zigzag feeling I had all over. All my Spanish exploded out of my heart and mouth like I hadn't forgotten one word and we hopped in the car for a quick Popsicle snack.

Jorge regaled us with tales of his recent travels in Peru with Megan (my roommate in Ecuador last year) and though we all wished she could be there, it was somehow still enough to know that she had just recently seen Jorge and had the desire to return to Latin America so soon too. It just further enforced the profundity of our experience here and the quality of people we met. Our coconut-berry-mint mango  pops (a truly Ecuadorian combination...) dripped as the dusty winds of Catamayo swirled around us. We were just sitting at a random corner store, but because even that in and of itself is something more markedly Latin American, I was so happy. If I had to turn around and get back on a plane to the US, even that little chat over Popsicles while listening to honking horns, churns of conversations in Spanish and sharing the same space with two people I love dearly would have been worth it. Luckily, it was just the first of my 10 days here, so there was far more to come.

We hopped back in the car on the winding road back to Loja. Something about that road feels tattooed into my memory, down to every last curve in the road. And when we came around the curve revealing the view of Loja below, I knew I was home, all the sparkling lights below.