Flying Quito to Columbia

Suzanne and I were hanging out in Quito dreading the next part of our trip, a 28 hour bus ride from Quito to Bogota.  Not only would this be one of the longest bus rides we've taken but its also guaranteed to take us through the most dangerous part of a much-safer Columbia (the south).  Of course we had checked out flights but a one way flight from Quito to Bogota was around $300 a person for a one-way!  Strangely, if you make that a round trip, the price will sometimes drop!  So obviously there is some sort of penalty for one way flights.  I think I had heard of that before in the States but maybe with the rise of Southwest and the other discount airlines, its become a thing of the past.  Not so down here, but the good news is we found a way around the penalty a multi-leg trip!  I kind of stumbled upon it, but if you're considering a flight, try to consider two and make it a multi-leg trip and somehow you'll avoid the one-way penalty.  For us, we decided first to go to Cartagena (on the Caribbean in Columbia) and then take a second leg to Bogota.  I luckily just put it in as a multi-leg trip and it came up as around $350.  So not only are we getting to Bogota but we're getting a very inexpensive leg thrown on for just a little more (the bus ride from Cartagena to Bogota is 20 hours each way).  We calculated that we would save ourselves 70 hours in a bus!  So if you're in a position like ours in South America, check out the multi-leg trip.

~Mike

Doing nothing and loving it!

After a bad experience at a hostel in Lima as we were dropping off my mom from her visit, we just wanted to get out of Lima and Peru in general. We spent in total just under 60 days there and we were ready to move on. But where to? We now have an extraordinary experience of not having to be anywhere at anytime for several months! I know that sounds weird, we've been having one great adventure for the past 8 months right? But one thing we did since the beginning was place deadlines on ourselves that forced us to do some detailed planning out at least a month or two. At the start it was get south as soon as possible before bad weather set in at Patagonia, then we wanted to get to a cool celebration of Semana Santa up in Peru, then we wanted to get Galapagos done before Thomas arrived, then he was here, then we were in the US then Mom was here. But now, glorious now, we have nowhere to be and no deadline except the end of our trip! Our road is completely open once again. Our first act in our new freedom was to head up to Quito. We had thought about going along the coast of Ecuador because we had heard good things about it from an Australian surfer dude but we had an urge just to go to Quito where we had familiarity and take some more salsa lessons. So that is what we did! The past couple of days have been full of nothing except a dance lesson! The rest of the time we have spent catching up on our blog, our pictures and just reading books in our room. We have a nice little setup in our hostel which has a great guest kitchen so we've been cooking our own meals.

But can it last?

We're reveling in our new slothfulness but we know that it'll eventually have to end. After all, there is only so much of our trip left and there's still a ton to see. Our long range plan currently includes us heading up to Colombia where we will spend a couple of weeks. Then a big decision is before us. Do we continue north through Central America or do we stick to our original plan and head down through Brazil and end in Buenos Aires? A quick finance check says that while we'll definitely go over our budget for our trip, we have enough spare cash to experience Brazil and BA. So that's our decision. Here's the catch. Since Brazil is expensive and BA is at the end of our trip, we're going to have to book flights and that means long range planning again! But for now, we're just enjoying the moment.

Included are some more shots of Quito's old town both at day and night, plus one or two of some dancing people we saw at the archbishop's palace.

From Quito

From Quito

From Quito

~Mike