BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA
Time really flies…and so do we! Tomorrow! Zoinks!!! Yes, tomorrow evening we will be heading to the Minneapolis, Minnesota airport for our trip from the USA to Colombia! Before crossing from North America to South America, however, we have a 5-hour layover in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. So, if you will be in the vicinity of the Ft. Lauderdale airport early Wednesday morning, shoot us a message and we can rendezvous for a coffee or tea.
We are scheduled to arrive in Bogotá, Colombia on January 10, 2017 at 2:30pm; this will be the official start of our South American adventure.
We will spend our first 3 nights in a hostel. We don’t have a ride yet, but we plan to hire a taxi or Uber at the airport. For a taxi, we will only get one from a legitimate taxi company booth/desk at the airport. Accepting rides from any old taxi driver at the airport can be very risky and should be advised against. Make sure that you use a service that you can verify to be reputable. Our flight lands at 2:30 and we estimate it will take around 3 hours to get off the plane, grab our bags and get through customs. Maybe an hour long ride to the hostel? Get to the hostel maybe by 6:30? We sure hope to get there sooner than that, but who knows how long things will take at the airport. We will be quite relieved when we are finally settled in at the hostel.
The first 3 nights in the hostel will give us a chance to acclimatize a little to our surroundings and give us the opportunity to engage with other travelers. Staying at a hostel first will give us a safe and secure place to arrive to from the airport. Arriving to a strange city and relying on an Airbnb host to meet you upon your arrival can be a little nerve-racking, so we opted for staying at a hostel, which would most likely be open to receive us safely, without issues, when we arrive from the airport in Bogotá.
We will leave after our 3-night stay and head for an Airbnb that is about a mile away from the hostel. We have reserved this Airbnb for one month. We will be staying with a man from Bogotá named Guillermo, his significant other, and their 4 cats. They seem to very friendly from our brief interaction with them online and their apartment appears to be very nice. Follow us to see how things work out there! 🙂
BEYOND BOGOTÁ
After we leave Guillermo’s Airbnb on February 13th, we will start our 2+ week long bus trek (buspacking adventure) to Quito, Ecuaor, where we are scheduled to arrive on March 3rd at another Airbnb.
This is where we could use some help. We don’t have any of our trip planned out yet between Bogotá, Colombia and Quito, Ecuador, February 13th to March 3rd. We have come to understand that it is much more dangerous to travel through Colombia by bus at night. Therefore, we plan to only travel during the day and are only planning to travel 3-4 maximum.
So, we are looking for any suggestions of places to visit, places to stay, or any other advice anyone might have about traveling between Bogotá and Quito by bus. The places so far that we are most likely going to stop at are (in this order): Ibagué, Armenia, Cali, Popayán, Pasto, Ipiales (Santuario de las Lajas*), Tulcán, Ibarra (or Otovalo?), Quito.
DISCLAIMER 2: We are new at this blog thing, as well as this backpacking (buspacking) across a continent thing, so bear with us. Please kindly let us know of any errors or typos. We hope to post daily, with videos, stories, interviews and photos. However, our ability to make posts and uploads to sakandjac.com and our other media outlets will depend on our current accessibility to wi-fi or other sources providing us with internet access.
SAK and JAC Backpack: South America 