A Plane? No!
Friday, February 15th, 2008Day 102
There is not much to write about today, it was a tough day. We had breakfast at the hostel and met an American who is helping his uncle sail boats to Colombia. Really? Sounded promising, until we talked about when the next crossing would be. “Oh, not sure. Maybe next Wednesday, but probably not”. That’s all we got from him and with that we set out to do something I really wanted to avoid. Search for a cheap flight to Cartagena, Colombia. Before we left the hostel we heard some loud bangs. Tear gas cannisters, just around the corner. The riots still continued around the city but not as large as the previous days. We waited in the hostel till all seemed safe and then headed out.
We discovered that a Colombian airline, Aires has the cheapest fares for the trip. The problem was finding their office in the city, travel agents didn’t sell Aires flights. We were walking to one last travel agent to check on prices when Jordana suggested we take a left turn to get there faster. “Hey, there it is!” I shouted out. We had stumbled upon the Aires office. If you have travelled before you will appreciate how rare this sort of thing is.
It all seemed to happen almost to easy and fast. Within 10 minutes our dreams of overlanding were crushed, we had a one-way ticket for Cartagena, Colombia on the 17th. Trying to forget about the flight we now turned our attention to researching Colombia and trying to find a guidebook. All I knew about Colombia was mostly bad, drugs, civil war, crime and of course kidnappings. However we did know that the security situation has dramatically improved. Also we have met a few people along the way who have known someone who has travelled in Colombia, its never actually been the person themselves that has been there but always they would have the same stories of a friend who raved about the country. It had been built up as a mystical place that tourists just don’t go to. We couldn’t wait to finally get there and find out ourselves.
Michael Coroneos