Posted by 
011505
After three days of cancelled flights I finally got on a plane to South America, via New Jersey. On Wednesday, Thursday, and again on Friday I’d arrived at the Ottawa airport nice and early for my 6pm flight only to get sat on the US Customs secondary inspection Group W bench for an hour or more before being grudgingly admitted to the American side of the airport, where my soon-to-be-cancelled flights sat patiently awaiting cancellation.
At this point in life my demographic, blasé grooming, and cultural interests meant getting pulled in at the border was something of a formality – or at last a lingering habit – but the surprise reappearance of my same-named birthday-sharing twin* slowed things down significantly during these four crossing attempts. Or disappearance, actually. Turns out other-Todd-who’s-not-me had recently been listed in the database as a missing person**. “Congratulations, officer,” I said. “You found us. Now can I go try to catch my plane?”
I only made that joke on the first day.
And then, as I alluded to in my opening paragraph, once I got through customs*** my flights were invariably cancelled, each time for weather (whether Ottawa’s or Jersey’s) until finally, on the fourth day and with a departure time of 6am rather than 6pm, I went through my standard Group W procedure (during which the Customs officer of-the-day made it very clear that he wasn’t going to let me fly; fortunately his supervisor told him he had to) and actually found my bum in an actual seat on an actual airplane. Woo! And not just any seat…no sir! In fact, this bum was sitting in one of those fancypants seats up front in business class! Not that I had any actual business to be up there, but thanks to my mother’s gratuitous aeroplan points I did indeed have a ticket to be up there, so for this guy and his butt it was a steady stream of comfy, complimentary Crown and Cokes along with upscale hors d’oeuvres all the way to Jersey.
I got to Newark at 8am and softened the blow of a fourteen-hour layover with more of the same in the Presidential Lounge, where I seemed to be the only person actively cheering for the Steelers as they came back to beat the New York Jets 20-17 and knock them out of the playoffs.
At 10pm I staggered onto the redeye to Lima and slumped into my oversized full-reclining seat. I made my dinner selection from the tantalizing and varied menu, ordered a couple of drinks and started a movie. Eventually my eyes could stay open no longer and I slept until about five minutes before we landed. At the airport I randomly met a Congolese-born Belgian guy who had lived in Peru for twenty-two years. Christian and I were going to the same hostel so we decided to share a cab; by the time we got in the taxi there were five of us travelling together.
No wonder there were so many backpackers going to the same place; it was probably the nicest budget accommodations I had ever seen. The hostel was housed in an old barely-renovated mansion directly across the street from the San Francisco Cathedral. The foyer was three storeys of greenery leading up to an open roof. Plants and animals were liberally scattered amongst a labyrinth of spiral staircases. Going to the bar upstairs felt like climbing a DNA strand through a cloud of forest, and when you get up there you just might have to step around a lazy iguana or an enormous free-range turtle.
Eager to save money wherever I could, I ended up splitting a room with another Belgian guy who had shared our cab ride. We checked into our spartan-but-adequate room and after a nice hot shower I hit that upstairs bar for a quart. It was only a bit after 8am so I kept it at just one. While I was up there I looked through the menu and was thrilled to see hamburgers listed for the equivalent of just seventy-five cents Canadian each! I thought I was in heaven until I learned that the Peruvian beef producers were in the midst of a months-long strike. It seemed that I would have to subsist on a strict pollo diet for the foreseeable future. Ah, well. At least it looked like whatever I’d be eating it would be cheap.
Though I’d only managed a handful of sleep amid a twenty-four-hour business class free-drink-a-thon I was feeling surprisingly robust, so I swished my bottle empty and took a tour of the church across the street.
The San Francisco Cathedral was built more than four centuries ago and it’s a beautiful building chock-a-block with cool paintings depicting the Passion of Christ and the life of San Francisco and stuff, but the real meat is in the basement.
Did I say basement? I meant “catacombs”.
Did I say meat? I meant “bones”.
Amazingly, Lima had no cemeteries until the mid-1800’s. Instead, mourners would deliver their dead to churches, where the bodies would be stolen away to the basement. It is estimated that the three storeys of catacombs that lie beneath the San Francisco Cathedral hold the remains of 75,000 people. Oh, and the bodies weren’t buried, oh no. They were just left there to become skeletons.
About fifty years before I got there someone had taken on the unenviable task of sorting all the bones in the San Francisco catacombs, so the visitor is confronted with enormous bins full of femurs, ribs, ulnas, and what-have-you. The bin of skulls made for a popular photo op. Also morbidly picturesque was the pit of skulls and bones thoughtfully arranged into a circular mandala.
Though my laugh-a-minute tourist schedule had me visiting the Spanish Inquisition museum next my drunken fatigue caught up to me instead, so after a bout of typing at a nearby internet cafe I went back to my room and faceplanted into a midday sleep for a solid five-hours.
*That’s right, there is (was?) a person out there with the same first and last name as me, and we share a birthday too; same year and everything. And not only that, his police stats, that is his height, weight, eye and hair colour all match mine as well. I know his police stats because he tends to get into even more trouble than I do. ‘Matter of fact, the only time I’ve ever heard this mystery man’s name it came from the stern, unsmiling mouth of a man with a badge.
**I couldn’t help but think that he might have been vacationing – or getting up to some sort of no good – in southeast Asia, which had just suffered a devastating tsunami that missing-person’d almost a quarter of a million people with a single wave.
***Last asterisk for this entry, I promise: On the Friday evening once everything got worked out the officer pointed out that I travelled a lot and I always got pulled into the border even though I never seemed to get in trouble. That was certainly true. He added that this was a waste of both my time and their resources and I readily agreed. He handed me a piece of paper. “Here’s an address,” he said. “Write to them and explain the situation. Maybe it will help.”
I did and it has [knocks wood furiously]. Since receiving a response to my letter stating that I would henceforth be treated the same as everyone else I have only once been pulled in at the border, and that was because a camper in the next row had set off some sort of sensor. Could’ve happened to anyone.
[knock knock knock…]
Todd Man Out 