Our little Fokker taxiing in Cali...
Why is it that when we have to be up early, we’re always up half an hour before the alarm is due to go off? It was a case of up and out, and we headed directly to the bus terminal on foot. There are no buses that serve the airport, so everybody who has a flight must take a taxi, either on the colectivo system mentioned in the last post (where they wait until the taxi is full) or just pay a more expensive fare and go. We entered one taxi who said that we would look for two more people to join us, and just after this moment, another taxi driver pulled up to the side and a very fast, Spanish dialogue commenced that was way beyond our current linguistic level. We watched as the other taxi driver rolled down to the bottom of the hill, literally fifty metres. When he had stopped, our driver coasted down and parked just behind him and told us that the other man would take us to the airport. But we were first informed that we now owed 3000 Colombian pesos because we had been given a ride to outside of the terminal, even though it was just a few footsteps away. Nice plan to con us helpless tourists! However, we weren’t paying anything for that and we watched as our driver paid the deviant his three (peso) grand. This new taxi driver was a lot nicer and he took us directly to the airport without looking for extra passengers, for a discount rate. And for once the discount was brilliant!
After a revolting airport breakfast of scrambled eggs, laden with chunks of thick, grey bacon, we boarded flight one of three to Cali. This was a little Fokker plane, which bore propellers on each of it’s wings and was considerably smaller than the average modern aircraft. Besides a rough patch of turbulence and no food being served on the plane (OK, we weren’t hungry anyway but come on!) the flight went very smoothly. The next flight from Cali to Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, was equally quick! Our only problem was that towards the last twenty minutes of the flight we were bursting for the toilet, and I mean REALLY bursting, as we had been guzzling this gallon sized bottle of water that we bought all the way back in Otavalo. We thought that we wouldn’t be allowed to take the water through customs back in Pasto so we stood drinking as much as we could, but they don’t seem to have the same rules as in Europe (and the rest of the world). What’s worse is that Bogotá’s airport is huge, with massive runways and we spent another twenty minutes seated in the aeroplane with our legs crossed tightly, as the pilot took his sweet time in finding the gate where we would shortly disembark. The moment we exited the plane we ran to the gents and the only thing you need to know is that WE MADE IT!!!
We made sure that we were where we had to be in plenty of time before our final flight to Cartagena and so we went through security control and into the waiting lounge. Our flight had been delayed slightly so now was a perfect time to get lunch, as by this time we were starving! One snag though! There weren’t any shops in the waiting lounge, just loads of patient, and impatient, people. And occasionally there was the waddling fatty who walked past, taunting us with a large “Dunkin’ Donuts” bag. The only thing we could do was to wait until we arrived in Cartagena since Avianca didn’t serve food on this flight either.
All in all, the day was a fantastic tour of some Colombian airports and was cheaper than a painstaking coach ride would have been! Can’t complain!
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