It’s a rare warm and sunny weekend in Quito, the kind of day that refuses to let you sit indoors, especially when it’s only your fourth in the capital city of one of South America’s most interesting countries. So I decide to visit “El Centro,” as the locals call it, “Old Town” to tourists. After a few hours of walking around staring at churches, monuments, and tiny stores, I figure the time has come to take a load off for a while so I sit down to rest on a bench at La Plaza de la Independencia, Quito’s main square. Being a Sunday, the benches are filled with people, mostly old men reading the paper or talking, and I’m lucky to find a seat. Before long the man in a slouch hat, glasses,and a sport coat beside to me leans over to ask me some innocuous question.

Next we’re deep in conversation, a half English half Spanish discussion about the weather, cars, our favorite fruits,Ecuador’s new president, Quito, and California. Soon enough a couple of his friends amble up and join our talk. I help the first man program one of his bearded friends’ number into his new cell phone and the four of us talk for about an hour before going our separate ways.

This hour sitting in a tree lined square in a continent I’d never been to a week before reminded me of the true greatness of travel – people and the unexpected, spontaneous moments and connections they entail. Churches, nature, museums, and monuments all have their place, but it’s the people that truly make traveling amazing–whether that means being reunited and drunk with old friends in a mysterious place or making a new friend three times my age in a huge city I know nothing about but he’s lived in for seventy years.