On the morning of Monday, May 14, we headed to the airport with our worldly belongings to fly to the next country and continent on our itinerary. Our trip was relatively seamless, other than the nonsensical 107 USD we had to pay for excess luggage. We used Copa Airlines and their luggage allowance was two bags of 23 KG each per person so, a total of 92 KG for the two of us. We had one bag of 28 KG between us, but still had to pay the excess fee. Unfortunately, time was not on our side so, we had to feed the greedy airline instead of shuffling things around to reduce the weight.
¡Hola Bogotá!
We arrived in Bogotá just in time for lunch and had the local specialty, ajiaco, for our first meal. Ajiaco is a soup of chicken and corn that is thickened with various types of potatoes and flavoured with herbs. It was delicious and we were happy to be eating local cuisine that did not consist of bland rice and beans. Thank you, Colombia!
Ajiaco
If our first meal was indicative of anything, it was that we would quickly fall in love with Colombia and fall in love we did. A very generous friend of Phil’s father let us stay in his apartment in Bogotá so, we felt at home right away. Plus, in stark contrast to Panama, we were greeted by friendly faces everywhere we went. Colombians seem to be genuinely happy people and proud of their country.
Bogotá just keeps getting better
Since we arrived in Bogotá on a public holiday, we had to return to the airport on the following day to pick up our baby bike from Air Cargo Pack. The whole procedure took a couple of hours and we were on our way.
Unloading of the bike and the biker
We had to get new tires for the bike and, after some research, we decided to start shopping around on Thursday. Our first stop was Don’t Stop and we didn’t need to go further as they had the right tires and installed it for us on the next day.
New continent, new tires
Our plan for South America is to move a bit faster than we did in Central America since the countries are much bigger and we want to see so much. We’ll have more stories to share, perhaps a bit backdated due to the time constraints imposed by being on the move, but we’ll keep our dear readers posted! For quick updates, please refer to our facebook page (link also at the top of this page).
