Adios Ecuador, Hola Colombia

In my last week in Ecuador, my Ecuadorian mum Eryka made us a beautiful dinner, so in return Elliot and I decided to make some western dishes. Elliot was in charge of the sweet sugared mushrooms and avocado (fry mushroom in disgustingly huge portions of butter, and when they are nearly done, put a few teaspoons of sugar on them to caramelise….amazing!), and for main course we had Spaghetti Bolognese. Cooking in other countries is always interesting, having to swap ingredients for those you can’t find, for whatever you can find, i.e tinned tomatoes do not exist in Ecuador. However it went a lot smoother than the time Lizzie and I cooked Butter Chicken without any butter. As a parting present for Eryka and Darwin, Elliot and I got them some roses (Ecuadorian roses are some of the best in the world), and a rug made from llama wool, with our names stitched on.

Early on the Monday morning we took a bus to the nearest town Ibarra, and then a connecting bus to the town of Tulcan, 6km from the Ecuadorian/Colombian border. From the station we caught a taxi to the border, where you have to ‘check out’ of Ecuador and then ‘check in’ to Colombia. For a few minutes there we were in no man’s land, in neither Ecuador nor Colombia, a very strange feeling indeed. Although we had heard good things about the actual crossing of the border, we were still a little nervous about the prospect of getting into Colombia. We shouldn’t have worried however, the crossing went smoothly. To get to the closest town Ipiales on the Colombian side, you have to take a taxi from the border. With only US currency (the Ecuadorian currency) vendors (or con men) try to sell you Colombian pesos for a ‘good rate’. On the taxi ride, Elliot asked the taxi driver how these people make money. He said that they manipulate their calculators, so it looks like they are giving you a good rate when they are punching the numbers into the calculators, but actually, you are getting ripped off. Funny how only moments earlier he had tried to sell us pesos! Our first stop was the town of Pasto, a place that most tourists really only spend a night on their way to/from Ecuador. Actually it was quite a nice place, even if I did have to lug my ridiculous amounts of luggage block and blocks to the hostel. The road between Pasto and Popayan is dangerous at night time, to travel even with a police escort is apparently dodgy. Instead of travelling at night, we took a bus the following day to Popayan, descending through the windy roads and into some heat. On top of a hill, we had a picnic of beer and nuts overlooking Popayan.

The next stop was Cali, the salsa capital of Colombia. I didn’t get a chance to show off my lack of dancing abilities, but we did get to enjoy some serious heat. Although we were getting further away from the equator, Cali is a lot lower in altitude than Ecuador so the temperature was climbing the further we got from the border. The shorts even came out of the bag! I knew I was carrying them around for a reason! After just two nights in Cali, we caught another bus to Salento, a little country town that had been recommended by many people we had met along the way. The hostel we stayed at offered cow milking at 4.30am, so we got up before the sun and attempted to milk a cow. There is defiantly a technique to milking, and so for the first few minutes, there was milk flying everywhere. The worker milked 5 cows to our 1! What a pro. We ended up staying at the hostel for 2 nights, before we met a hippie man at the markets in town. Him and his wife had just set up a hostel of their own, and were only taking bookings in person. Considering it was half the price of the other hostel (equivalent to $7.50 a night), we decided to stay with them for 2 nights. They lived a very hippie lifestyle, making and selling jewellery and knick knacks.

After Salento, we spent a couple of nights in Manizales, one of the hilliest towns I have been to! Luckily we didn’t attempt to walk to the hostel, considering it was basically all vertical roads, and instead got into a taxi with a lovely lady man. The next day, after walking around for hours in the hope of finding a park with grass, we settled on having a picnic lunch on the grass in the middle of a round about (a large one). I think the Colombians definition of a park is much different to ours! Medellin was our last stop in Colombia, one of the largest cities outside of Bogota (the capital). Downtown was very poor, with many beggars and dirty streets. Again after finding no park for our picnic lunch, we headed back toward the hostel, to find a cute little park just 2 streets from where we started. We got some beers and sat on a bench, enjoying our last beautiful afternoon under the Colombian sun. You can’t beat that!