Lima, Peru

Monday, December 13, 2004:

[I had a late evening bar-hopping around Miraflores with two crazy Irish guys named William and William. I asked them if they were related, but they said "No." William was a barrister in London before quitting to travel. William was involved in advertising. William could drink me under a table and so could William. As a last note, it is not fun when your taxi driver is driving full speed down the expressway at 3 AM and then takes both hands off of the wheel and turns around in his seat in order to better describe to you (laughing all the way) the time he got pulled over by the police while snorting coke as he drove two British passengers down the same expressway. It is rather funnier when the driver then emphatically offers you cocaine, marajuana, his bottle of sugar-cane liquor and prostitutes and asks to spend the rest of the night hanging out with you. (No, No, No, No and No.)]

It was a slow, hazy and introspective blur of a day. I woke up shortly before noon and lay in bed for a long while with an endless series of urgent, vitally important questions burning in my head.

What the hell am I doing in Lima?

Is this trip really just some sort of self-indulgent flight from reality?

Have my kidneys teamed up overnight and eaten 4/5 of my liver?

My little Chinese alarm clock, the one I had bought in Honduras with a watch and calculator for the total price of $3, lay face down and corpse-like at the far end of the room, its battery torn out and lying by its side like a severed appendage. I must have savaged the poor thing sometime around 9.

I made several efforts to rise, moved one leg slowly, then the other. Testing, testing. One... Two... Amazingly, I found that I could locomote about, more or less. Yay.

I staggered to the bathroom. It seems that in return for suffering dozens of icy, freezing cold showers during my trip thus far, I was rewarded today with the generous payback of every drop of the steaming hot water I had been deprived of along the way. On a day when I probably needed a freezing shower more than on any other, I had a volcanic hot spring gushing out at me through the pipes. I could not get a drop of cold water to come out. I fumbled around, dodging this way and that, feeling a little like Kramer in a Seinfeld episode.

After all of this, it shouldn´t come as a surprise to hear that I wasn´t up for doing very much. This was just as well because my planned activity --- a trip to Peru´s National Museum --- turned out to be an impossibility. I had neglected to notice that the Museum is closed on Mondays. This left me with only one responsibility for the day, though it was an important one: I had to somehow find a way to reschedule (push back) the dates of my flights from Buenos Aires to Rio and Rio to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. As it stood, the Buenos to Rio ticket was dated January 5 and the Rio to Dar ticket was dated January 16. At the rate I was progressing from place to place, I could no longer see myself getting to Rio until the middle of February. Which meant I would have to stick around until the beginning of March. Sounds great, yes, but I could I do it? I´d had a premonition that I might want to make a change like this even back before I left home. Accordingly, several days before the trip began, I´d called Expedia.com to inquire as to how easy/difficult/possible it would be to switch flight dates. "Pretty gosh-darned easy," they´d told me. My experience that day would clarify that what they had meant by that was really more along the lines of: "We already have your money, go screw."

I decided to see if a travel agent could help me. Travel agents --- being, as I understand them, "agents" specializing in "travel" --- generally tend to understand how these flight changes work. My planned 4-day stay in Utila, Honduras turned into an incredible 15-day stay only because a very helpful travel agent (the island´s only travel agent) was able to reschedule my flight for me on next to no notice. Surely, if you can make these changes on a swampy, mosquito-infested island of 6,000 people, you can do the same thing in Lima, population 8,000,000 (no swamp, moderate number of mosquitos).

As I walked down one of the main roads in Miraflores, I saw a travel agency with a number of flashy signs in its windows. Some of them advertised the various airlines the agency booked flights with. Continental, TAME, British Airways, Varig, American Airlines... My flight from Buenos Aires to Rio was with Varig. Moreover, all of my tickets had been issued by American Airlines on American Airlines ticket stock, even though only my flight from Newark to Tegucigalpa (with last-minute free unwanted layover in Miami) was on an AA plane.

In the agency, the man behind the desk smiled at me and bid me good afternoon. I briefly explained my situation. I reached into my bag and showed him the tickets. His pupils dilated. He stared at me incredulously, as if I were mad. I doubt I would have received the slightest difference in response had I had stalked into the room in my underpants, reached into my bag, slapped a dead cat on the counter and claimed to be Rasputin (who I am, by the way). I was asking the impossible, he explained. These were paper tickets, already issued and nobody could change them but the airlines themselves at the airport ticket counter. Why don´t I go to the airport to change them?

Umm... because I´m in Lima and these flights are from Buenos Aires, Rio and (re: the connection to Dar es Salaam) Johannesburg?

He didn´t seem to like that response. The point was, I needed to see the airlines directly. Was there a Varig office in Lima? Somewhere. Was there a South African Airways office (the carrier to take me to Dar)? No chance of it. 1 airline out of 2 was effectively 0 out of 2: Not too bright to switch my Varig Rio flight back to February while I am still committed to fly from Rio to Africa in mid-January, is it? (I`ll give you a hint: The answer is No.)

I´d already formed a Plan B ahead of time. I would go to an American Airlines ticketing office. They had issued all of the tickets for my flights, which suggested that they could also modify and reissue them. What was more, they would surely, surely speak English there. The helpful gent back at the travel agency spoke only a little and while we managed to speak a combination of Spanish and English well enough to comprehend one another, I wasn´t quite confident that I was up to speed on all of the Spanish vocabularly I needed to know to ensure I would get what I wanted. The more I thought about it as I walked, the more I was convinced that a trip to AA should have been my Plan A all along (Pretty clever, the AA with the A Plan thingie, no? Yeah, well, I didn´t think so either...).

The offices were located on the posh second floor of the ritzy, 4-star Hotel Americas. The agent didn´t speak a singular lick of English. What did I want? Huh?! Change already-issued paper tickets for flights with other airlines? Mad as a mad monk, this one. Can´t do a thing. You need to go to the airport to change these flights. And so it went. I tried to get my point across --- that American Airlines had issued these tickets through some form of cooperation with the other airlines, could they not do the same thing again? --- but I just got nods of the head. Some were in response to what I said, some were to signify that she had no clue as to what I was trying to say. Curiously I have noticed (generally, not entirely) that my ability to effectively communicate in Spanish declines rapidly in proportion to the amount of effort I am asking the listener to apply.

What was my Plan C? Crying? It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I decided to try calling Expedia.com first. I had purchased my tickets through Expedia and had never had a bad experience with them. In fact, all of my vacations over the last 4 years had been booked through Expedia. This had, in the due course of time, elevated me to Expedia.com VIP Customer status. As a result, I had recieved, along with a letter praising my exalted achievement, a very special, limited edition, Expedia.com mouse pad for my computer. Exhuberant with good feeling, I had promptly thrown it into the garbage. But now... now was the time to call in a VIP Customer emergency call, to see what my options were and if Expedia.com could help out one its very best customers in a time of dire need.

"Hello?" I said.

"Hello? Hello?" came the voice on the other end of the line. "Hello?"

"Hello?" I said.

"Hello? Hello?"

"Hello?"

"Hello? Hello? Hello?" It sounded like a modified game of Marco Polo, only stupider.

Finally, the line cleared a bit.

"Hi," I said, and began to explain my situation. I had purchased tickets through Expedia.com which were issued through American Airlines. I needed to make some changes.

"Hmmm," came the voice over the line. "Hmmmm. Please hold."

I waited for five minutes until the voice came back over the line and asked me to hold again. Several minutes later, the line cut out. I shook the phone. I yelled into the phone. I said bad things. Then I re-dialed.

"Expedia.com" A woman´s voice. Possibly with a Texan accent.

"Hello?"

"Hello? Hello?"

"Hello?"

"Hello? You´re breaking up. Hello?"

I explained the story again. I was told I was breaking up again. I was then put on hold. For about 10 minutes. I prayed the line wouldn´t break up.

"Sir?"

"Ummm? Yeah?"

"American does have to reissue the tickets according to their contract with us. But you might still have to pay a fee."

"Do you know how much?"

"Please hold."

"No! No!"

"Please hold, sir."

"No, wait, I don´t need that information---"

"Sir! Please hold!" Very annoyed now, by my protestations.

I waited. And waited. Finally, the agent told me that it would be a relatively cheap $70 or so, payable to Varig for the flight to Rio. Not horrible.

After the call, I realized that I had two options. Option 1 was to march back to American Airlines and attempt to explain that an agent at Expedia.com told me that they had to issue new tickets to me. I could see where this option would get me: Nowhere. Option 2 was to call an English-speaking representative in the US and explain my conversations with AA Peru and Expedia.com. Based on my past experiences with AA, I figured I knew where this option would get me: Nowhere. Torn as to what to do, I decided that crushing frustration and rage would best be inflicted upon me in my own tongue. I dialed American Airlines in the US.

"American Airlines." The voice of a woman, thankfully not with a Texan accent.

"Hello?"

"Hello?"

"Hello?"

"Yes? Hello? Sir?"

I explained the whole sordid situation. I mentioned that the Expedia.com agent said AA had to change the tickets. This seemed to make the AA representative angry.

"How would she know if those were the terms?" the representative demanded.

Was this a pop quiz? Was she personally offended on behalf of American Airlines? I didn´t know.

"I don´t know," I said.

"Please hold," she said.

I waited for 15 minutes before the rep came back on the line to say that there might be something they could do, if I would give them the dates I wanted to change my departures to. After turning them over, I waited another 15 minutes. I think I fell asleep once in the little wooden phone booth. Finally, the rep told me that I could make the changes I wanted, but that I would have to head back to the Lima office of AA to get new tickets.

"But will they know what to do there?" I asked. I was panicked. I could see the agents at the office staring at me as though I were nuts again.

"The information is now entered in the computer under your name," the rep assured me. This was the best I was going to get. I thanked her and hung up.

I marched back to the Lima AA office. I got there at 6:03 PM. It was closed.