Megan says Hola!: Colombia

Last weekend we had our first 3 day weekend and we took advantage of it by making a trip to Colombia.

We left Friday morning and took a 5 hour bus ride to Tulcan, and crossed the border into Colombia and stayed the day in the boarder town of Ipiales. We shopped around in the town, ate some delicious Colombian food, had one beer and were warned frantically by our server to walk home as fast and as soon as possible because we were very easy targets to be robbed at night.

On Saturday morning we were up early and took a bus to Pasto, in Pasto we went to visit the biggest lake in Colombia. We took a little boat ride to an island on the lake and it was just beautiful. We wandered around some more on Saturday night and were up early on Sunday to take 2 buses and 4 taxis over 8 hours home to Quito.

All in all is was a successful first foray out of Ecuador. We were careful to travel only during the day because there is still some risk associated with travelling in Colombia. Also apparently the border towns are the most dangerous and we spent the weekend in the ‘kidnap capital of Colombia’. Various taxi drivers, servers, hostel owners and websites presented us with varying levels of danger associated with being a foreign traveler in this area. So we were very cognizant of our surroundings and nothing bad happened. (Sorry Mama! Aren’t you glad you didn’t know exactly where in Colombia I was until I had returned safely?)