Most hero’s journeys begin with the hero consulting an oracle or receiving divine guidance from an unexpected source. Our journey with the Hillstroms was no different.
Todd and Lisa, with their kids Seth and Liliana, are beloved cousins from Lodi, California, who took a leap of faith and flew down to Ecuador to share our journey with us for a couple weeks. We could not have been happier to have them along for the ride. We’ll be dipping into our experiences with them in more depth — our odyssey together involved many thrills, from zip-lining to inner-tubing down rain-swollen rivers to a mythological battle with scorpions that one night decided to share our airbnb house in Baños — but today I wanted to start at the beginning: With the consultation of our oracle, who in this case turned out to be an Ecuadorian aura therapist named Billy.
The Hillstroms flew into Ecuador the day before we returned from the Galapagos Islands. We were scheduled to meet up at the airbnb we rented in Quito, which turned out to be in a remote location in the northern part of town. We arrived to the mysterious neighborhood after nightfall and our airport taxi driver, thrown by the enigmatic address, dropped us off at an intersection and wished us luck. (This happens with unnerving regularity, incidentally — the way the addresses are set up in Quito is confusing even to locals.) The usual lack of streetlights and preponderance of barking dogs added to the ominous quality of our search, and the dragging of all our earthly possessions behind us added to the urgency. I tried to call cousin Lisa and our landlady in vain. We came upon two large burly men on the dark street and, throwing myself at their mercy, I asked for help. They responded with élan. One of them ran up and down the street until he found our house. We made it. A happy reunion with the cousins ensued, that very special feeling of seeing someone familiar in a place that is not — I’ll call it an ecstatic lack of context.
We were all famished at this point from our travels and the unfamiliar neighborhood seemed shut down for a night. I recalled what seemed like an open restaurant from our house search and we descended on it en masse, only to find a completely empty cafe where a few Ecuadorian men were hanging out drinking beer. They assured us that they indeed had food and set to work making us pizza and hamburgers, the lingua franca of American cuisine. One of them was very proud of the beer selection of his restaurant/hangout space and prodded me with various local brews until, reeling from the altitude (my brain’s been bouncing from sea level to 10,000 feet like a yo-yo), I became quite drunk. Then a tall, lean Ecuadorian approached our table and offered to read our auras.
His name turned out to be Billy, and he had an interesting story. He’d trained to be a cinematographer in Italy, but due to a lack of film industry in Ecuador, had become a reader of auras. He was a lifelong epileptic and could always see auras of color over people’s heads. Apparently (this is all coming from Billy) only one in a hundred epileptics could read auras, and he was one of the few. He told us that our kids all had healthily colored auras (apparently violet, blue and green are good auras to have), and that Cleo’s purple jacket nicely matched her aura. Cousin Todd, however, evinced an unhealthy yellow aura. (This became a joke for the rest of the trip — whenever things went sideways, it was because of Todd’s yellow aura.) Before we knew what was happening, Billy had all of us adults on our feet standing outside the restaurant, hugging each other. He was taking us through some special aura therapy that, due to the language barrier, and maybe due to the fact that it was total bullshit, was hard to understand. It basically involved telling Billy the highlight of our lives and then hugging our spouses while thinking about it. If we weren’t hugging the way we should, Billy showed us. This was one of those moments, when you’re standing on a dark street in a foreign country being hugged by a stranger, where you stop and think, “Um, what’s happening here? How did this happen?” The kids were inside eating pizza, wondering the same thing.
We made it back to our dinners without incident and with only minor improvement to our auras.
