So Over Bus Travel...

When I evaluate how I've spent my time over the last year, I can honestly say that most of it has been spent on buses. I may have lost months of my life on public transport going from one place to the next because I was too cheap to buy flights.

On each bus, I usually encounter some sort of animal whether it be a chicken, bird, cat, dog or even a guinea pig. People crowd the rest of the space and I just try to blend into the scene. Since I'm usually the only foreigner on the bus, the locals take great delight in helping me get off at the right stop. Sometimes the entire bus cheers me off so I know I can't get lost.

What has become a typical travel day, I took an hour bus from Montanita, Ecuador to Puerto Lopez, then switched to an overnight bus to Quito and arrived at 4:45am. I took the 5:30 am bus to Tulcan that took 5.5 hours, switched to a taxi to get to the border, crossed the border, took another bus to Ipiales, switched to another bus to Popayan that took 8hrs. After 29hrs, I arrived at my final destination in Colombia. En route, I took a quick detour to visit the Santuario de Las Lajas near Ipiales. The church was built into the valley to memorialize the appearance of the Virgin there in the early 20th century.