Southern Exposure

Tuesday, January 20

We woke up around 9 am, had breakfast at the hotel and came back to the room to watch Barak Obama’s inauguration ceremony. We have been waiting for this moment ever since we left Seattle, hoping we could be somewhere in a bar with a bunch of Americans getting drunk on beer in the middle of the afternoon. Instead, it was just two of us high up in the mountains of Colombia’s border town in the Junior Suite room of a nice hotel watching the the ceremony on a flat screen TV. I guess it could have been much worse than that.

We were savoring the moment as we watched Obama’s acceptance speech. It has been a long road for him and because we have supported his campaign every step of the way (Matt was even a district delegate), it was a celebratory and gratifying moment for us as well.

As soon as the speech was over, we packed our bikes and were on our way to crossing the border into Ecuador. We only had about 80 km to ride to the border and once we got out of the foggy town it turned out to be a nice and sunny day.

We planned on stopping in the town of Las Lajas to see a spectacular church there before crossing the border. Unfortunately, we spent our last penny on gas and could not even afford parking the bikes in the special parking lot that was mandatory for going into the church. I agreed to guard the bikes while Matt went to the church, but the walk was too long to do in riding gear, so we abolished the idea and took pictures of the church from the road instead.

We arrived to the border around 2:30 pm. When we got to the aduana on the Colombia border, the lady took our import papers and told Matt we didn’t need to do anything else on this side. We crossed into Ecuador and joined a long line of people for passport control. The line was not moving for two hours.

Finally, we got into the building and the moment we gave our passports to the immigration officer the computers went down, which I guess is what happened while were were standing in line earlier. Half an hour later, the computers were back on, but it turned out we needed to get stamped out of Colombia. Not sure how we got misled by the lady on the Colombia border, by now we should know the procedure by heart. So we drove back to the Colombian side, got the passports stamped and I was back with the immigration officer, while Matt went to start the bike importation process. By 6:30 pm we were finally done, but our plan of riding 100 km to the next big town in Ecuador was not going to happen because it was getting dark very fast.

We decided to spend the night at the border town of Tulcan, which was only about 10 km ride inland. We took the first cheap hotel we found because it had secure parking, and hot water. The hot water however was not working as we found out later. After a quick dinner we went to sleep. Tomorrow we will be arriving in Quito.