Our first stop in South America was Bogota, Colombia. First impressions of this city is that it’s cold! Super cold! After enjoying an average temperature of 30 degrees in New York, flying into a high altitude city with an average temperature of 10 degrees was a shock to the system. Good thing that we had packed appropriately and could rug up to enjoy the city.
Bogota is a cool capital city with amazing street art on every corner. We stayed at the very cute Lima Limon Hostel in the La Candelaria area (the hostel has a cat called Nutella who will sleep on your bed and make you feel at home). La Candelaria is a beautiful colonial section of the city that has a cool vibe during the day, particularly around the Plaza de Chorro de Quevedo. It’s a little dodgy at night due to the amount of crackheads roaming the streets but as we weren’t out partying this wasn’t an issue for us. A cable car ride up to Montserrate provided us with a birds eye view of the city.
Our plan was to head from Bogota to Quito in Ecuador. We were a bit worried about attempting this because of reports of FARC guerrillas and bandits hijacking buses to rob or kidnap tourists. Turns out it’s a pretty easy journey, although time consuming because of the day buses we chose to take for safety reasons.
The first leg of our journey was a night bus from Bogota to Popayan (about 12 hours). We chose to spend a night in Popayan, a lovely colonial city, to recharge our batteries – we stayed at Park Life Hostel, which I highly recommend! The following day we took a bus from Popayan to Ipiales (about 8 hours) on the border of Colombia and Ecuador. We were advised to take a day bus on this section of the journey because this is the area populated by the FARC and bandits (we’ve met several people who have taken a night bus through this area and reported everything to be fine – better to be safe than sorry though). We spent a night at Ipiales so we could get up early to visit the Basilica Las Lajas, a stunning cathedral that spans a gorge. We fell in love with a puppy here too and I wish we could have taken him with us! A smooth border crossing into Ecuador and a 5 hour bus to Quito marked the end of the three day cross-country journey.
Chasing the Cheese 