Wednesday 3 October 2018

Schedules and Sarongs

Schedules and Sarongs

Like all good schedules , this one went a bit wrong. We have had a month at home in France, busily entertaining ourselves with chores and friends. The timing is perfectly planned to have a good night’s sleep and depart at 9am to catch a train to Paris with a few hours to spare before catching the plane to Bogota: Except we receive an email from KLM reminding us to check in and, shock horror,discover our plane leaves at 7am not 7 pm . Oops. With a bit of a flurry we tidy the kitchen, made some sandwiches, stuff a pillow each and the electronics into a knapsack and switch off electricity and water. We are not planning to be back until christmas. We are taken to the local train station within the hour by our ever helpful neighbours. We manage to change our train tickets which take us to central Paris, not the Airport, and enjoy a wonderful evening stroll around Paris, watching Tango dancers on the steps at LĂ“pera before catching the bus to Charles De Gaulle Airport.A ghetto blaster and speakers played romantic Latin American music to which passersby danced , showing off their skills at flicks and tricks. Our good night’s sleep takes place on the icy cold marble tiled floor of the French airport Terminal. Not one to leave half empty bottles of wine, brandy and whisky behind we pack those too into the knapsacs, cunningly concealed in plastic water bottles. Laying our sarongs on the floor and warming ourselves with a tot or two, we settle down on the floor, with I might add, a good few other people enduring a long, long night waiting for the boarding gates to open at 5am. Even in our discomfort on the floor, we feel sorry for those passengers with lolling heads balancing on the silly metal upright chairs. In Dubai airport there are sleeping rooms and reclining couches for the overnight passengers We get to Amsterdam by 9am, hang around a bit more then finally board the flight to Bogota for a good 10 hour sleep. The weird thing is , we arrive at Bogota at 2pm the same day, having ´lost´seven hours. We catch a taxi to the bus station and book the 5pm bus to Ipiales, some 900kms away. More than enough time to catch up on sleep and jetlag. Gee Whiz, do we sleep? Like pass out or what!! The sarongs, sandwiches and pillows come in handy again, but the water bottles now contain only water. Seven hours into the journey the drivers swop over, and we all disembark for a ´Banos´break and some coffee with another stop again seven hours later: This goes on and on for twenty seven hours as there are delays when the Police stop and search all the luggage with sniffer dogs and there are roadworks due to landslides. Intermittently, when our eyes are open we see stunning gorges, valleys and mountains, but we dont really care too much. We are anxious to see if our motorbike is where we left it some 3 months ago, in a parking lot under the hopefully watchful eye of Carmel.  When we arrive at Ipiales, on the Colombian/Ecuador border we stumble into a rather tatty hotel at the bus station and collapse. We left France on Wednesday evening and when we wake up it is Saturday morning. 
We awake bright and early as our body clocks are out of tune with Colombian time, stretch, throw back the covers, pack, pay the bill and in our eagerness to get to the bike discover that the sarongs are hidden under the bedclothes. Never to be seen by us again as we only realise this when we are across the border and 300kms away. We mourn the loss of these precious sarongs. They have been with us for more than ten years on all our adventures and have served us faithfully as towels, sheets, headdresses and anti-mosquito shawls. I stamp my feet and move on!

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