Monday, 14 December 2009

Ecuador to Colombia

Our flight was short from Coca to Quito - 25 minutes from boarding to
touch down. Very different from the 14 hour zig-zag bus that we had
taken from Quito to Coca. Money well spent.
Quito is a big busy city, our mission was to find a bus to the border
town of Tulcan (7km from the Colombia border). After checking times
with 2 companies we finally found a bus leaving in the afternoon, 6
hours. We went shopping, all the markets are all geared up for
Christmas! We had heard lots of scary stories about Quito from other
travellers, but we felt safe - it felt like there were police on every
corner.
The bus was long but the scenery was beautiful - volcanoes and
mountains. Tulcan was a tiny town. The hotel that we had researched
was closed, but second choice was probably the best hotel we've stayed
in yet. Sky TV, watched smallville :) power shower. Great breakfast.
We got a taxi to the border. No queue, walked across a bridge with our
luggage, went into the Colombia immigration office, no queue, stamp
stamp done. So easy - Geographically too! The Peru -Ecuador crossing
was very weird - kinda all over the place. This time there was only
one road, the Panamerican highway. Both offices were right there. Got a
taxi from the border to the bus station in Ipiales and were on a bus
within 5 minutes bound for Popayan. This was another hellish
mountainous zig-zag journey... 8 hours. Kirsty had the sick bag out
again! We got stopped and searched 3 times along the way. The girls
just get bags searched, the guys get a proper pat-down and ID check.
We arrived in Popayan and within an hour we found ourselves on another
bus, bound for our first Colombian destination - San Agustin. We
managed to pick up a hamburger as we jumped on the bus- frozen in the
middle :( This bus journey was meant to be 5 hours, it ended up being
7 hours, on rough rough rough untarred roads, picking up locals from
little villages along the way and dropping people off constantly.
Towards the end of the journey the bus stopped, the driver got our
bags out and announced that we would be getting picked up by the
tourist information representative from San Agustin. The bus would now
skip this town and continue to it's destination. It felt wrong at the
time, but it turned out to be the perfect solution. We picked up our
small backpacks from under our feet and noticed that our food bag was
missing. Our theory is that because of all the zig-zagging, it must
have slid out and someone fancied all the sweets and chocolate :( I'm
particularly sad about it because it had my book in it too. I was
reading about these 3 blokes who followed the path of the amazon, from
source in the mountains of Peru, to the Atlantic, in a rubber raft.
I'll never know if they made it :( I'll buy it again.
So, along comes George. He looks after all the forigners in town, very
sweet guy. He had been woken up by the bus driver to come and meet us
at 2am. He still managed to give us a guided tour of the town as we
crept along the sleeping streets. We had hostels looked out but George
offered us their tourist information accommodation, which was cheap
and perfect. So happy to climb into bed after the worst bus journeys
we'd experienced yet. We counted up 130 hours in 5 weeks.
Sent from my iPhone

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