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So I'm back in South America! But anyone would think someone was trying to stop me the amount of difficulty I've had getting here! The flights should have been fairly simple, as I booked the ryanair flight to Madrid a day before the flight to Bogota, so there was no way I could miss it!
Apart from still not having packed the morning of my flight, everything was going smoothly until I realised I'd lost my yellow fever certificate... I haven't actually ever been asked for it, but if I didn't have one I guarentee every single country would ask me! Turns out I'd left it in Cambridge when we went to get my new passport, but that was no good to me in Manchester with a flight in 3 hours! So I frantically rang my doctors to ask for a new one to be told they couldn't interrupt the surgery until 12:00.. ermm too late, my flight's at 12:45! In the end they managed to have it ready for 11 and we raced off to the airport, where I got stuck in a huge security queue, but made it through just as my gate was opening!
Made it to Madrid! But the airport trouble was only beginning... I tried to check in for my Iberia flight to Bogota and the woman told me I couldn't. Why? Because I didn't have a flight out of Colombia. But I didn't have a flight out of Chile last time when I flew into Santiago. Doesn't matter, Iberia are clearly idiots, and won't let you fly into Colombia without proof that you will leave again, as if I'm off to become an illegal immigrant there! So all I needed was a reservation she told me, just buy one from the Iberia office next door. As I only had 2 hours until my flight took off I didn't really have much choice, and headed to the office, where she told me that I COULDN'T just have a reservation, I had to actually buy a ticket, but she'd find me the cheapest (which turned out to be 512 euros!), and I could get it refunded at the office in Bogota airport.
Could I get a refund in the ticket office in Bogota airport? Of course I couldn't! Nor could I at the office in the city which they sent me to and took about 3 hours to find! But they did give me the number to ring to get the refund, which turned out not to even be the right number, it was in fact lost luggage! Luckily I have a dad who can sort these things out for me, as I wouldn't have been massively impressed having to pay an extra 500 euros for my flight!
So anyway I made it, and here I am back again! I decided that my trip from Bogota to Santiago would only be broken up by a few stops, so I am currently on route to Mancora (Bogota-Ipiales 27 hours, Tulcan-Quito 5 hours, Quito-Guayaquil 10.5 hours, plus borders and waiting at bus stops in between!) The most interesting thing (or possibly only interesting thing!) on the journey being the food stop, where I had no idea at all what I was ordering, even though it was in Spanish, but found at the bottom of my soup bowl an interesting assortment of bones and two feet. I'm gonna have a guess that they were chicken feet, but they definately looked a lot like alien's feet!
Oh and the fact that they wrote on my bus ticket 'Sofia Gringa', we're obviously all just the same to them!
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