Journey to Colombia

Similar to most of our trip, Colombia was not originally part of our plan. since it was completely out of our way. However everyone we met who had gone, said it was the best part of their trip and being only 5 hours away from the Colombia border we decided to try and fit a bit of Colombia in.

This was our first time taking the buses alone and involved multiple buses and taxis so I was a bit nervous about our Spanish communication. Turned out I had nothing to worry about and I'm  completely comfortable getting around on the buses now.

We started out from Quito and know we needed to get to the Ecuador boarder town of Tulcan. The first task was figuring out how to get a bus to Tulcan.  We discovered our LP bus information for Quito was incorrect  after visited a random bus station in Quito and asking where we could get a bus to Tulcan. The information they provided didn't match the book so we did our own research online to find out Quito had recently opened two bus station and closed the previous main station. One bus station serviced all areas north of Quito - this was the bus station we needed. And the other larger bus station served all the buses heading to locations south of Quito.

To get to the bus terminal we could have taken the public tran for $0.25 each, however everyone seemed to recommended against taking  all your bags on the public tran, since it's very crowded and pickpocketing is common. So instead we took a 45 minute cab ride to the station which only ended up costing us $6.

At the bus station you have your pick of companies, with them all yelling at you to go with them. The price doesn't really vary by company, so our strategy was to pick the company that was leaving first. So we ended up boarding a bus that left 10 minutes after we boarded, for our 5 hour bus ride to Tulcan.

Just as an fyi, one thing we have discovered about the long distance bus is they actually act as local buses for the small towns along the way. Most people don't necessarily take the bus to the final destination but rather get off at the small towns along the way. So while the bus resemble our long distant coach back home, it's not uncommon to see the isles filled with passengers and kids who just pay $0.25 to take the bus between towns. So they can actually end up quite packed.

Crossing over into Colombia

Upon arriving in Tulcan we knew we needed to take a taxi 16km to the Ecuadorian/Colombian boarder, this cost $3. We then had to wait in line at the Ecuadorian boarder for approximately 15 minutes before getting our exit stamps then heading over the bridge to visit the Colombian immigration. There was a shorter line at the Colombia boarder and the protocol was pretty straight forward. We just showed our passports on both sides and they just stamped away. We were now officially in Colombia!

We had no Colombia pesos so we ended up changing $40US  with one of the licensed changers at the boarder and hoped that was enough to cover our taxi and bus to Pasto. Our plan was to get Colombian pesos from  a bank machine in Pasto, which actually worked out well.

Walking around Pasto

The taxi to the nearest boarder town bus terminal cost $7,000 peso (roughly $3.50) and from there we boarded a two hour bus from Ipiales to Pasto which cost us another $7,000 pesos each. We originally had no intention of spending much time in Pasto but had read that night bus travel is not safe between Pasto and Popayan, since the buses are sometimes robbed by bandits at night. And since it was already 3pm and Popayan was another 6 hours away we decided not to risk it and stay in a hostel for the night. In our hostel at Popayan we ran into a guy that took the night bus and he said that a police guard actually sat in the front of the bus with the bus driver because apparently when they do rob the buses they usually shoot the driver. Although we read that even the buses with  police guards were still targeted by bandits at night. We were also really happy we did the drive during the day because the scenery was beautiful. We thought we had seen lots of nice mountain drives in Ecuador but the mountain landscape was actually different and somehow nicer in Colombia.

Our bus scenery in Colombia