So the journey has started.
We flew with Iberia and after a very short delay while 2 passengers were off loaded (I've never understood how you can check-in and drop off your luggage and then not actually board the plane....) we were on our way to Madrid, a short and uneventful flight.
The two hours we had in Madrid were adequately filled with us having lunch and a couple of pints of San Miguel.
Iberia's inflight entertainment is poor and there was a collective groan when we had it confirmed that there were no individual screens - with the option of watching one film on a grainy screen about six rows in front of me I opted to read my magazines.
Lunch was a pasta salad, followed by a larger hot version of the same dish and a sickly sweet square of cake, washed down with a Fanta Limon.
Having traveled with Abby a number of times before she is used to me falling asleep at will on flights and leaving her to entertain herself, I however am not used to her doing it and so when she did when left with limited entertainment opportunities I was forced to people watch (I've made it sound like a chore, I actually love it).
Three of the rows next to us were occupied by 12 Dutch travellers, all dressed in their hiking gear - for a 10 hour flight an interesting choice. Four of them had started on the cute little bottles of red wine you get on flights at the earliest opportunity and by the time that Abs (Abby) was in the land of nod they were beginning to lose their hand eye coordination and half way through the flight the man closest to me was wearing two bottles of wine on his clearly absorbent and not particularly waterproof walking trousers.
iPads really are the most incredible invention; I'm able to update my blog, Skype my Dad and when flying with Iberia watch TV programmes - Abs introduced me to Private Practice - I will be introducing her to The Thick of It on our next entertainment free flight.
We arrived at our hotel at about 8pm, Apartasuite Nuevo Dorado, it's clearly a converted office and very basic but it's clean and they serve very good scrambled eggs for breakfast.
At 10:00 Rodrigo arrived to take us on a tour of Bogota however as we had no idea what he looked like nor he us we walked straight past each other at reception!
The old part of the city was my favourite with an old square filled with families making the most of the 'family day' and outside the library there was an impromptu Tango class, so Latin American.
Coffee in Juan Valdez - the Starbucks of Colombia (but with much better coffee) where we saw an 'Indios' an indigenous person which Rodrigo said was quite rare, it looked really surreal but as I'm not yet able to ask for a coffee confidently I was never going to be able to ask if he would be happy for me to take a photograph - so that's one for the memory bank.
For lunch we had churrasco (a steak) and then while we were eating Abby was crowned the queen of Colombia by the in house entertainment - I have photo's which will follow. It was over lunch that we found out that there was a city wide alcohol ban something that Rodrigo wasn't aware of but said wasn't uncommon; it was because of a local election. Clearly we looked pitiful or alcohol dependent as our hotel very kindly sourced 4 cans of beer for us - so whilst the hotel may be basic it has rocketed up in our estimations because of that small act of kindness.
So, today we fly to Cartagena at 2:15 - where it looks as though it is hot and wet (in a tropical way I hope).
See you in Cartagena!
Rains x
