Women, men who ride horses, and kids

Day 38
We woke up early after dancing into the wee hours of the night to bumping techno beats with flashing green lasers, only to get on the coldest bus ride ever to Bogota. In Bogota, we stayed at a quaint homely hostel where not only did we get hot showers, free breakfast, and free internet, but we were also  taken care of by the cleaning women, who was the closest resemblance to a mother figured we´d had since we left home.

Day 39
Today was a Sunday and we´d heard about a nearby flea market so we went on a mission to go find it. We never made it to the actual flea market we were looking for, but there were numerous other ones that we ran into to compensate. So we spent the day walking around, trying different foods, and denying merchants left and right, who were trying to sell us everything from used cell phone chargers, remote controls, tattered wigs, blenders, all the way to typewriters. After a day of walking, the cold Kristin had been fighting began to creep up on her, so we headed back towards the hostel to relax. Her cold was likely due to a disgusting hoodlum we were trapped with on the gondola in Medellin, who was hacking with his mouth open while trying to sell us a ring that he´d obviously stolen and polluted with germs. Needless to say, we took it easy for the rest of the day.

Day 40
Monday turned into quite the scavenger hunt for Massive Attack tickets. Our English friends from the Darien Gapster informed us of their arrival so we fetched them from their hostel in the morning and the rest of the day turned into a wild goose chase around Bogota. What we thought would be an hour and half round trip to a mall where we cold buy our tickets turned into an hour and a half one way trip across the city. Then on the way back, we learned a very important lesson. We were staying in the La Candaleria district, so without thinking the 5 of us jumped on a bus that said Candaleria and assumed that we´d be arriving safely back at our hostels in about 1.5 hours. However, after being on the bus for a good 2 hours and not recognizing anything around us, we decided to ask a fellow passenger if we were near our destination. We learned that we most definitely were not when the entire bus erupted in laughter and told us that we should get off immediately. After this experience we gave up on public transportation and hopped in a taxi that got us safely to our hostel in roughly 30 minutes. We spent that night gathered around a table telling our new friends what life is like in America.

Day 41
We woke up to the rainiest day we have ever experienced. We needed to take a quick trip to the store, when just to our luck, the sky opened up to torrential downpour and hail. In the 20 minutes we were outside, we managed to get more soaked then we´d ever been. Needless to say, that was our only trip out for the day. We did however get to know some of the people we were trapped in the hostel with.

Day 42

We decided to take a day trip to Zipaquira where we visited Colombia´s most impressive man-made wonder, an underground salt cathedral. It took about 2 hours by bus to get there and we stopped for a quick meal before entering the cathedral. During brunch, we were greeted by about 15 school children who thought that we were the bee’s knees and excitedly practiced their English with us.
We took a 2 hour tour of the underground salt mines where we learned there are 16,000 things you can do with the salt they extract, except eat it. Some highlights were mining salt, blowing dynamite, and most importantly wearing hard hats. SAFETY FIRST! At the Englishmen´s hostel that evening there was a free salsa class so they came and fetched us when it began. Obviously we were at the top of class, aside from our teacher who was probably the best dancer we´d ever seen in our entire lives. He honestly had the ability to shake his booty and move his hips faster than Shakira.

Day 43
We both weren´t feeling well and we had Massive Attack the next day so we took day relatively easy, though we can proudly say that we conquered the bus system! Our main event for the day was to go to the mall so that Kristin could find an outfit to wear for Massive Attack. The mission was a success, but other then that it was a pretty uneventful day.

Day 44

Anxiously awaiting the show to start!

We awoke on Friday ecstatic that the day had finally come for us to see Massive Attack in Bogota. During the afternoon we went to the Museo del Oro, a gold museum, that is known to have the largest collection of gold in South America. After touring it thoroughly, we went back to the hostel to get dressed and prepare ourselves for the night ahead of us. Once dressed, we hopped in a taxi, sat through a traffic jam worse then any one we´ve been in ever in LA, and after an emergency bathroom stop we made the taxi driver take, we eventually made it to the show and met up with our friends. The show was absolutely AMAZING and shockingly uncrowded!
Afterwards we recappedand wound down with our friends and then headed back to our hostel toget ready for a day of travel to day to San Agustin, a small little hippie village.

Day 45 through 47

San Agustin was beautiful though our hostel was rather unwelcoming. Here we took a ¨jeep¨ tour of the Parque Arqeologico, where we saw hundreds of tombs and statues and ate a delicious meal. After the tour
we prepared to depart the next day to Popayan



Day 48

Ewwwww.

We arrived in Popayan early in the afternoon to a very accomadating hostel in the historic district, aka ¨la ciudad blanca,¨ that provided us with a map of all the sites we could see within walking distance.On our walking tour we saw beautiful churches, viewpoints, and wound up at a museum with stuffed animals of every imaginable species. The most disturbing being beetles with horns as big as your face. As we left the museum we ran into a friend from Seattle that we´d met at a previous hostel and made plans to reunite in Quito. Popayan quickly became our favorite small town, though we weren´t sad to leave because one day was sufficient to see all and we were excited to be moving onto Ecuador.

Day 49

¡¡¡ECUADOR!!!

We left Popayan early to ensure that we´d be crossing the border with plenty of daylight hours remaining, because we´d been worried that this border would be troublesome. It turned out to be a breeze. Our only complication was when we couldn´t find the window where they would stamp us out of Colombia, but it turned out that it was because our taxi driver had already driven us across the border into Ecuador, so we just had to walk back across the bridge, and all was solved. We then hopped onto a 5 hour bus to Quito and arrived in the early evening with plans of going out that night. However, altitude sickness quickly became a problem, being that we were in the second highest capital in the world, and we wound up playing cards and going to bed early instead.

Day 50
Our first day in Quito we spent exploring the La Mariscal neighborhood, the neighborhood we´re staying in, and wondered down to an artesian market. We were pleased to find that not only did Ecuador have awesome things, they were also affordable. We kept spending to a minimum here though because we had plans to go to the biggest artesian market in South America the following day, in a city about 2 hours away called Otavalo.
Later that day we met up with some of Ned´s friends for coffee, and we found out they were taking off that night for a beach town called Canoa so we wouldn´t get a chance to hang out with them. But since they were heading towards the sunshine, so we made plans to meet them there. After weeks of rain we are ready for summer sunshine again!

Day 51
Today was a fabulous day! We went out to Otavalo early in the morning, although we were feeling under the weather and it took a lot of motivation to get out of bed, but it was absolutely 100% worth it. Not only was the market cheap, it had some of the coolest things we´d ever seen. We allowed ourselves to splurge a bit, but we ended up with some very very cool memorabilia, the most exciting being the most amazing
pair of overalls ever made.

Day 52
Rain struck Quito with a vengeance once again. Our plans of wandering around Old Town were shot so we spent the day huddled inside a coffee shop trying to stay warm and reading our books. We plan to leave Quito for Canoa tonight where we´re hoping for sunshine.

"Hey Dad, I´m in Colombia!"

Day 25-27

 Though Panama City was quoted as being the "Miami" of Central America, and though neither of us have been to Miami, we cant imagine that Will Smith would have written a song about it if it were anything like Panama City. The hostel, Lunas Castel, was really nice, we picked up more reading material, and got to see the Panama Canal, but other than that, it was uneventful. Public transportation was confusing, to say the least, and people stared at you blankly even when you were speaking perfectly understandable spanish. As a result we mistakenly took a hot, sweaty, icky, bus around the entire city, and though it was a nice tour, it turned out our intended destination was only 6 blocks from our hostel.

We knew we wouldnt be able to cross the boarder into Colombia overland so we made plans to take a boat. We needed to get to Portobelo because thats where our boat, the Darien Gapster, would be waiting for us. We had to take 2 buses to get there, the second of which was unbearably overcrowded, sweaty, moist, and theft-ridden (good thing our thefts were only after an ipod charger, a cell phone charger, and a headlamp). Portabelo was interesting as it used to be one of the richest cities in Panama and is now made up of beach side ruins.

Day 28
Our ocean adventure started that morning on a 20 passenger speed boat, with bench seating, and shade to protect us from the elements. We opted for this trip over the common 4 day sailing trip because this way would get a cultural experience by visiting many different islands in the San Blas chain. The first day at sea was the easiest with only an hour of travel to Nalunege. Here we got to interact with the island native, the Kunas. We played volleyball with the kids while the adults generously prepared our dinner. And spent the rest of the evening hanging out with our fellow travelers.

Staying warm in the ocean during the storm with new friends

Day 29
The second day at sea was a bit rougher leading to our new friend Lisa getting violently sea sick. But we eventually made it to Iguana, a practically deserted island populated by just a few fishermen. Here we lazed in the sun for a while until a pounding, terrential, thunderous storm rolled through. But dont worry, being the wilderness survivors that we are, we were able to erect our tent in under 90 seconds and were able to keep all of our stuff dry. Well almost all of it. That night was spent gathered around a camp fire with burning plastic and lobster spewage.


Day 30
We woke up in the morning to hear the other travelers complain about almost drowning in their tents during the night. Thank goodness for our perfectly awesome tent, because we stayed relatively dry. The last day at sea started out like the 2 previous days. We left from Iguana Island and docked at Piños for lunch. Piños was a beautiful completely deserted island but we didnt stay for long because we still had a couple hours on the boat before arriving to Colombia...so we thought. However, in 2 hours instead of being in Colombia we had docked at a beach that was supposedly 10 minutes from Colombia. We were told we were staying the night here but everyone on the boat opposed this idea as we were all anxious to arrive in Colombia. At that time we had no way of knowing that this would lead to a chain of events that would delay our arrival to Colombia by 4 hours. At around 5:00 we were rushed to leave the beach by our french-canadian captain, Marco, the worlds most interesting man who constantly had us in stitches. After getting on the boat we were told we had to back track to go get our passports checked by the "officials" farther north. We arrived there at 5:40 and were told that if they didnt have all 21 of our passports checked by 6 then we would have to stay at the broken down, water logged, military invaded city, that is Puerto Obalido. Needless to say none of us were thrilled about that idea, so we stood over the 2 men checking our passports with flashlights, encouraging them to hurry up. Luckily we made it by the hair of our chiny chin chins. (we learned in the end that they were just looking for a bribe and that we already had the stamps they were looking for) We finally pulled into Sapzuro, Colombia, exhausted, soaked, and coughing from the fumes of the boat around 7.

Day 31
First thing in the morning we had to offically get checked into Colombia and then we just hung out for the rest of the day because we couldnt catch a boat out of the area until 7:30 the next morning. That night we celebrated our friend Lisas birthday was the next day and we wouldnt be together the following evening to celebrate with them. Marco arranged for us to have a dance party on a small covered dock with a mini bar.

Turbo

Day 32
We had to wake up at 6am and a night full of drinking did not leave us feeling well. This day was full of punishment. It began with a 3 hour turbulent boat ride to Turbo, the most terrifying place in the world. Luckily we were with a small group who made the arrangments for us to get to Medellin from Turbo on one of the worst roads we have traveled. We got to Medellin halloween night, thought we would be able to rest up to celebrate, but ended up getting delivery and going to bed. Happy Halloween.






Day 33-37
We LOVE Medellin. Its our favorite place so far. It has everything, its beautiful, has the best public transportation complete with gondolas, and a great night life. Here we learned all about Pablo Escobar and his influence in Medellin and Colombia, actually the whole world. We mistakenly went to a museum that is made for 3rd graders to take field trips to where we learned about static electricity, and the 3 phases of matter. We saw amazing views of the city aboard the 2 gondola lines and visited the national park thats at the top of one of them. We also went to the largest mall in Colombia where we cursed ourselves for walking into a store where we fell in love with everything in it but couldnt justify buying anything. Tonight will be our last night here so we intend to go out with a real bang, though we will probably be cursing ourselves on the 8 hour bus to Bogota tomorrow morning.

WE LOVE YOU, GOOD NIGHT!

-Kristin and Molly