Our originating flight from San Andres Island, Colombia departed at half past midnight and arrived in Medellin (Central Colombia highlands) around 2:30AM. Since town was a 45 minute taxi ride away we decided to crash on the airport floor for the night as we'd need to check in by 7AM. Not worth the effort or money for a hotel or so we thought until about 4AM when the floor started to get pretty hard. Maybe we are getting too old to sleep on airport floors or more likely we just need to be more prepared next time for a better nights sleep when we pull backpacker moves like this. Before leaving San Andres we had a send off dinner with some other sailors whom were headed to the Cayman Islands and whom were kind enough to give us a ride to shore so we could leave our new dinghy safe on the davits of LightSpeed.
Early this AM around 5:30 we gave up on trying to sleep and found some strong Colombian Coffee called 'tinto' to get things going. Once checked in with the airline around 6AM we decided to see a bit of the countryside and hailed a cab for a quick sight seeing tour. The cab driver was great (drove slowly and sanely and spoke very clear and slow Spanish). The countryside was spectacular. The cool light rain accentuated the wonderful smell of pine trees and earth. 'Finks' or small farms dotted the rugged yet verdant green landscape. Beautiful! As a side note police armed with m-16's were at every cross road as apparently the president of Colombia Álvaro Uribe Vélez has two finkas in the area. I personally like to see the police out in force... this equals personal safety in my mind.
We are now on the ground in Miami with a three hour layover... I'm not complaining as any 4000+ mile trip where I'm not captain is nothing short of a vacation.
No comments:
Post a Comment