Columbia – Getting There….

Day 1 – Longest day Ever

We woke up fairly early as we wanted to do the waterfall trip before we left Mindo at 2pm. On checking our E-Mail’s we discovered that one of our flights for this evening had been re-scheduled so we had been put on another flight at 4am the next morning.

 

 

The new flight time meant that we would have about a 7 hour lay over in Bogota so we would have to try and sort this out after breakfast.  We went down for breakfast which was very good and set in the hostels gardens which were pretty with lots of feeding posts where dozens of humming birds were flying around.

 

 

After breakfast ,we started to try and sort out the flight and got into an on-line chat with the flight agency.  Trying to sort out different arrangements was very time consuming, in fact in took until midday and still ended meaning we would have to get the 4am flight.  It also meant we no longer had time to do the waterfall trip which was a shame as we had not really done anything in Mindo.

 

 

So we had a hour or so to kill so we just went to have a drinks before heading up the road to catch the bus back to Quito.  The journey again was around 2 hours back over the picturesque mountains arriving back at the bus station around 4ish.  From there we quickly caught a taxi to take us to the airport which took another 45 minutes.

At the airport we went to the check-in for the first leg of our journey to Bogota but were told by the lady (computer says no!) that we must provide evidence of an exit ticket for Columbia.  We had hoped our final Mexico to UK ticket would do the trick but she wasn’t having it.

We then had to find the Wifi area of the airport to try and book a ticket online to Guatemala, once we had found one we thought we would be able to book it with the airlines sales kiosk inside the airport.  However when we tried to book the tickets we were told it would cost £500 each instead of the £150 each we could buy it online.  So we had to go back to the Wifi zone and spend the next 45 minutes anxiously trying to book it online via our phone.

Eventually we sorted it out and got an email confirmation to present at check-in, which was accepted and we were allowed to go through to the boarding area.  In order to use up our last US dollars we went to a burger restaurant to fill-up as we still had a long day ahead of us.

The flight to Bogota wasn’t that long and we were soon arriving around 9pm, we had arrived in country number 18, Columbia.  After passing through passport control we went to an ATM to get some local currency, at 3,700 to the pound it’s going to take some time getting used to.

Getting some directions we made our way to domestic departures in order to wait for our connecting flight to Cartagena in north of Columbia.  As it was early when we got there and checked the departure boards and could not see our flight there yet.  So we walked around the airport and found a kiosk where we managed to sort out a local simm card for Shell’s phone, which was good as we didn’t manage to do this in Ecuador.

We had about 6 hours to kill so we managed to find a restaurant where we grabbed a coffee and took advantage of their power points to recharge our electronics and also spend an hour or two blogging until it appeared they were shutting up around midnight.

Checking the boards our flight was still not up there so we just had to find some uncomfortable seats to sit, wait and read……