THE GRUELING ODYSSEY TO THE GALAPAGOS
And we're off!
As you may have noticed, our (now slightly superfluous) countdown timer has been removed as we have started our 6-month journey that will take us to Sydney in July! Due to the ridiculous amount of time and distance we found ourselves travelling in the first 5 days of our trip we introduced a distance counter from our starting point as well as to the final destination.
Along the way so far we have learnt that while saving a significant amount of money on airplane tickets by chosing a 'slightly' more convoluted route might seem like a good idea from your sofa back at home, doing a grueling 12,700km in 7 segments over 5 days pushes the limits. Next time we might just schedule a few days of rest in between!
Let us now fill you in on the details about how we got to our first target destination.
Step 1: Departing the old continent (10,422km Budapest to Cali (Colombia). stopover in Milan, Amsterdam and Bogota)
Another way of retrospectively rationalising this detour within Europe was that we couldn't possibly leave for two years without sampling the highlights of its cuisine one last time and brushing up on our language skills: "Una pizza per favore" and "Kan ik probeer de kaas?" come to mind.
Side note: Not that either of us were in need of further calorie intake, as our waistlines had expanded considerably over the particularly indulgent Christmas season at home (can anyone say no to Mother's and Grandma's cooking?), putting at risk our ability to fit into our carefully selected travel gear. Luckily(?) this problem was solved when we got a pretty bad case of food poisoning at a (retrospectively) seedy-looking restaurant in Quito which subsequently limited our nutritional intake to 1.5 biscuits / person / day. We're both feeling much better now, but important lessons were learnt to avoid the particularly dodgy eateries and about what a big influence food has on your mood!
Either way, neither of the two excited people in the picture below (taken at Budapest) had any idea how sick of flying they would be by the time our airplane stopped over in Bogota (32 minutes short of Cali, our destination) to pick up additional passengers.
But, we had finally landed in South America after 1.5 hours (Budapest to Milan) + 2 hours (Milan to Amsterdam) + 14 hours (Amsterdam to Bogota) + 34 minutes (Bogota to Cali) !
Step 2: Getting to the Galapagos (720km overland Cali to Quito, 1310km flight to Galapagos)
The small problem remained that we were still in Colombia, to where we got a cheap return airplane ticket from Europe, while our objective was to get to the Galapagos for Renata's birthday on the 18th (we will circle back to Colombia later on in March). As we've found cross-border flights in South America to be horrendously expensive, our other option was to take the bus. I mean 720km can't take that long - that's like 4-5 hours on the highway, right? Wrong!
Luckily we had done our research, and expected that we'd only be able to cover that distance in two full days - but we had absolutely no idea how it could take 20 hours...Granted, the terrain is very mountainous, and hence it isn't particularly advisable to take buses in the dark, but we didn't mind travelling in daylight as we got to enjoy the beautiful scenery and to have a proper shower and sleep in a bed at night. The quality of the bus and the roads were also much better than expected, very few potholes (if at all), even if the Panamerican Highway is only 2x1 lane road in most places.* No, the biggest unexpected usage of time was built-in breaks. This is best illustrated by the following conversation as we pulled into a 'service station' (meaning a restaurant, a bathroom, and a guy who is magically able to 'clean' two complete buses with a single bucket of water) literally in the middle of nowhere sharply at 13:00:
Bus driver: "OK, lunchtime everyone"
Me (surprised, in my passable Spanish): "Oh, OK, so how long are we stopping?"
Bus driver (starting to speak slowly and louder): "WE. ARE. STOPPING. TO. EAT. LUNCH."
Me: "OK, but how many minutes do we have? 10 minutes? 15 minutes?"
Bus driver (patting my shoulder and in a tone as if explaining to a 4-year old asking stupid questions): "Chico, we are stopping to eat lunch. When everyone is finished eating lunch, we will continue."
We ended up taking over an hour break which occured multiple times over the journey.
*An interesting urban legend about the Panamerican Highway is that certain sections of it in South America were funded and built by the USA in exchange for the countries allowing them access to their ports during WWII - I don't know, the story sounds a bit shakey to me, but you never know...
We drove over beauitful scenery across the Andes which varied from lunar terrains, hill-side coffee plantations, steep cliffs and corn fields to lush forests. We wished we could stop to take some good photos as from the bus it proved to be a challenge to avoid trees by the road to hide the fantastic view. Here are a few attempts with the clouds coming across the Andes and some vegetation:
By the end of the first day we had finally made it to the sleepy town of Ipiales on the border with Ecuador, and bedded down for the night, ready for an early start to visit the Santuario Las Lajas, a UNESCO-listed monastery before crossing the border. It is an amazing sight in a beautifully tidy environment - a sharp contrast to the town Ipiales -, straddling a smallish river and bridging the two sides of a steep canyon.
While waiting for a collectivo to the border (a shared taxi / minibus that only departs when full) we met a very friendly young Ecuadorian journalist, who gave us some tips on what to visit and helped us gringos navigate the border controls - this way it only took 2 hours!
On the other side of the border we finally got on the bus to the capital, Quito, which we were assured was a 'bus directo' (which of course it wasn't, we stopped every time anyone needed a lift to the next village). Unfortunately the bus rolled forward 50m and then stopped for an hour while we waited for the police to come and inspect our luggage. I must say, the wait was worth the while, as the pieces of luggage they spotchecked underwent an `extensive search` for narcotics, so I did feel safer on the rest of the journey: the bag wasn't even opened, and I was asked two questions: Who am I travelling with, and do I have anything other than personal belongings in my bag?
Luckily we had hordes of vendors entertaining us during the wait, selling everything from food, to dolls and handcream - we even had a comedian, which unfortunately I couldn't quite follow in Spanish, but he had the rest of the bus laughing...
Once the bus had gotten going, we made good progress. Apparently Ecuadorians had realised that buses lost a lot of time to STOP. TO. EAT. LUNCH, and developed a more efficient method to nourish their passangers: every half hour or so, when we entered a village, we'd stop to pick up a vendor to hawk their wares (hot food, fruit salad (complete with utensils), potato / banana chips - you name it, they've got it), we'd carry them 5 minutes to the next intersection where they would get off and catch another bus to go back to where they were, leaving our bus passengers' stomach full.
Finally having made it to Quito after 6 hours on the bus, we were glad for the one-day rest that we had planned. Unfortunately it was somewhat spoiled by the food poisoning mentioned above, so we weren't really able to venture outside the immediate vicinity of the Old City, but from what we did see, it is a very picturesque colonial city centre.
Luckily by the next day we were feeling somewhat better for our flight to the Galapagos at 06:55am, and even had enough patience to tolerate the ridiculous number of queues, the people cutting queues as well as the administrative processes.
Long story short, we finally made it to the Galapagos to start to enjoy the wildlife and the scenery, but also to get some well-deserved and much-needed rest.
Thanks for reading our post and stay tuned for our next post about our adventures in the Galapagos islands!
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