We reluctantly checked out of our gorgeous airbnb and said goodbye to the wonderful views of Quito to tackle another day of travelling. Another day bus journey, this time with a few different sections, including the border crossing into Colombia.
We left at 7am and caught the taxi to the bus station - so far so good. When we bought the tickets we were told that the bus to Tulcan on the Ecuadorian side of the border was leaving immediately. We rushed through to the bus to find that it didn't leave until 8am. Lesson - when the person selling you the ticket says the bus is leaving now .... it probably isn't (but it also could be ... so don't completely ignore them either)!
The bus ride itself was fine. Once again we were subjected to a snake oil seller, this time something with ginseng in it, and she took great pains to explain that the product wasn't made in China! It was very common on this trip for food vendors to hop on the bus. One stop was hilarious, the bus was virtually turned into a market, there were so many of them that the aisle was full as they all shouted over each other trying to sell their wares and get past each other.
We arrived at Tulcan a little after 1pm and we jumped in a taxi to "La Frontera", the border crossing.
The formalities on the Ecuadorian side were quick and painless, we then walked across the bridge to the Colombian side, where immigration there was also easy. We changed some money (no ATM on the Colombian side, though there was one on the Ecuadorian side) and hopped into taxi number three to get us to the bus station in Ipiales. On the way there were many police stopping cars, trucks and bikes and going through them, we realised that as we were close to the border the police must be looking for cocaine smugglers.
The plan in Ipiales was to leave our luggage while we went and visited Las Lajas Sanctuary. We had read there was official luggage storage, and we saw a sign referencing it, the problem though was that we couldn't find it. K asked a few different people who sent us from one side of the terminal to the other, before we were worked out that we could leave it one of the shops (2000 pesos per bag). They probably make more out of that than selling their biscuits and drink.
We then caught taxi number four to visit the beautiful Las Lajas, an exquisite grey and white church built across a canyon with a waterfall nearby. The taxi driver was very chatty and wanted to know a bit about Australia (it seems all anyone knows about Australia is kangaroos). He asked if we were near Germany, or England, we tried to explain where we were and that we were an island, but we couldn't quite get him to understand how big Australia was, especially when we told him it had half the population of Colombia.Las Lajas itself and its surroundings are postcard perfect, unfortunately it started to rain but it was still beautiful. We had walked down from where the taxi had dropped us off to see the church, but as there was a teleferico we decided to take it back up. After a very slow trip up, we found that there were no taxis there to take us back to town. We walked down to the road to hail a taxi, but everyone that came past had people in it. Eventually a local bus came past and we hopped on. The driver seemed to find it quite amusing that he'd picked up two stranded gringos, when we asked if it went past or near the bus station he just kept grinning. He was obviously useless, so using Google Maps we jumped off when we thought we were close and followed Google's directions to what ended up being the local livestock and wholesale farmers market part of town - not a bus station in sight.
Some locals pointed us in the right direction., and after a 10 minute walk we finally found the station, collected our bags, and got on a bus to Pasto. We were told this one was leaving "now" - and this time it actually was, it started moving while we were finding our seats. The trip went through beautiful scenery of lovely green rolling hills and we finally arrived into Pasto at around 6:30pm.
We picked up taxi number five for the day and gave him the address of where we were staying in Pasto. The driver was either very dumb or decided he couldn't be bothered with gringos, he pretended he didn't know where to go, we ended up stopping him and hopping out when he started driving away from the place we had to direct him to using Google Maps, but we couldn't see anything like a hostel or house. It was now quite dark, we had only been in Colombia a few hours and it was the second time we were stuck on the side of the road! We were fairly sure we were in the right area though, and after a bit of searching the area we managed to find our accommodation.
In summary, after 12 hours of travelling, 3 buses, 5 taxis and 1 teleferico we reached our destination, a little tired and hungry but also pleased that we hadn't decided to push on any further that day!
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