colchisikms

On Halloween night 2018 we travelled midway through the week to arrive early morning in Billund, Denmark, home of Lego and heartland of the Vikings. We were greeted on the bus journey from Billund to nearby Vejle (humorously pronounced “vile”) by a bird of prey sitting on a fencepost. Travel in this part of Denmark…

When guidebooks unhelpfully overhype attractions, they certainly don’t pull any punches when it comes to South America. The irritating and meaningless phrases “a tale of contrasts” or “a country of extremes” are thrown around mercilessly in a bid to passionately sell books, rather than dispassionately review and inform. So what makes South America so “extreme”?…

We arrived in Colombia’s capital on the 11th March 2015, and almost immediately noticed on the news stations that the Colombian terror organization called FARC were joining the peace process after decades trying to reach were we had finally gotten to. It was good to see that the journey to their destination, Bogota, was now…

We headed on a 7:00 AM bus back to the white city of Popayan on March 8th. Though it took us 5 hours to get back, we wanted to push on and make it to the city of San Agustin, another 5 hours or so in the opposite direction down a horrible rocky road that…

The bus on March 5th from Popayan out to the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Tierradentro (located in the small “town” [it was actually one street] of Tierradentro) was quite an adventure. The ride was absolutely beautiful, but the road was being re-done and it took forever to maneuver through the mess that had been…

Colin and I arrived in Popayan on March 2nd and checked into a convenient and very “backpacker” hostel called ParkLife we found right on the main square, getting their downstairs basement room called the Gipsy Quarter. The hostel’s land had originally been part of the Cathedral next door, before it was purchased by the Paisa…

The crossing into Colombia from Ecuador was one of if not the easiest border crossings we had done. We managed to get into the town of Ipiales very easily, and we headed to an ATM immediately to get out loads of bumwad from the bank of Toyland. We had been used to dollars for so…

I decided I wanted to see some of Ecuador’s Amazon, so on February 20th I took a plane ride to a city called Lago Agrio in the north of Ecuador. The flight was pretty fantastic – very short, and only a little turbulence when we flew near the absolutely stunning volcanoes. I got picked up…

We arrived in Quito on February 18th and set about finding our new hotel, La Rosario, which we had booked online. The hotel was up an annoying hill that we had to take taxis in and out of, but the hotel itself is quite nice – it reminded me of a spa when we first…

On the 17th February, we left Ambato and headed North back along the road to Quito in our journey towards Colombia. We got to a city called Latacunga where we took a small local bus around what is called the Quilotoa Loop. Named after a village on the loop, this mostly touristy route circles around…