The end of Colombia to the beginning of Ecuador.

From the last time I blogged Natalie and i have made a few changes.
One we did not make it to the Salt Cathedral in Bogata, we decided since we are going to visit the salt flats in Bolivia our time and money would be better spent not seeing the Cathedral. We also heard that the it was kinda a waste of time.

Second - We decided that we wanted to see some of the coffee region of Colombia. We picked a place called Solento and a hostel called The Coffee Plantation. This turned out to be a great choice, the town looked like a miniture version of Swizerland.

Once we got (9 hours later) there some packpackers were going on a horse tour. This was really cool so we asked them if it was alright if we joined. Out of the six that went only three had any experience with horses. I was not one of them. Ben (one of the six) was extremely nervous about the whole thing and happened to get the most exciteable horse. Mine was awesome, really chill and did everything i asked. The only problem that I had was I just could not handle going more then a trot. Everytime we went faster then that I had the unshakeable feeling that was about to fly right out of the saddle. During the ride we saw some really cool landscape.

The next day we went on a hike of the local mountain. At the top for 3000 pecos we were given a cup of hot chocolate and some cheese. We were told to put the cheese into the hot chocolate and allow it to melt. This turned out to be an awesome way comsume both cheese and hot chocolate. Later on that day Natalie fell ill and i went on a coffee plantation tour. The tour was a lot of fun and i learned a lot about the process of making coffee. From the fruit from the tree to the roasted coffee bean you grind up a home.

Once this adventure was done we went back to Bogata to hook up was to Ozzie girls for a night on the town. We were going to go to a bar that was suppose to be full of drag Queens and midgets but we were told by some local Spanish english students that it would be a little over the top. Basically we would not be able to handle it. Instead we conviced them to take us out on the town. This turned out to be a lot of fun. Its funny once a Colombian male decides that he is going to look out for you, they take it as their personal mission to make sure you are safe. It turned out to be a great night of drinking and dancing.

The next day Natalie and I decided it was time to start the move to Ecuador. We went to the bus station in the morning with the intention of going to San Agustian. We quickly found out that we had arrived there way to early the only to times that buses left for this destination as 5pm and 9pm . We didn`t want to wait that long so we bought a ticket to Popayan which is just a town on the way to the border. It was like a 20 hour bus ride. Unfortunately we both slept through our stop, the man beside us had a hard time figuring out that this was not a bad thing because the bus was actually going all the way to the border anyways. So at the next town we bought a ticket to Ipiales. The bus driver and the other people on the bus thought we were nuts. By the time we reached the border we had been on a bus around 24 hours.

The long trip did not stop there, we had a little further to go. After a wee bit of confusion at the actual border crossing we were on our way to Otavalo.