It's A Long Way to Armenia

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Soooooo...Tazos are just pogs. I watched a video on the internet. There's no real difference. So I'm collecting Simpsons pogs. And it's 2015. And I'm not ashamed.

The trip to Armenia was a long 16 hour bus journey, so I'm just going to hit the highlights (if you can call them that). It was a long day, but I'm glad we made it in one shot. We don't plan on spending any time in Armenia, but it's a short bus ride to Salento, but we knew we'd be getting in too late to go to Salento and find a place to stay. So it was a sensible place to stop. Well, except for the 16 hour journey/

The journey started in San Gil when we got up very early at 5am and caught a 6am bus to Bogota. Fortunately it was a nice comfortable bus with a bathroom, and it didn't make to many stops along the way so we made decent time to Bogota. I also managed to get a little bit more sleep despite the windy roads.

The bus rolled into Bogota around 1pm. Bogota has a huge bus terminal, and it's divided into several smaller terminals grouped by buses heading in particular directions. We searched for Armenia departures, and found a bus leaving at 2pm. That gave us enough time to grab some snacks for lunch.

It wasn't a huge bus, but not a small one either. Let's call it, a medium sized bus with a bathroom. It was kind of like a city bus, and wasn't the smoothest ride, but it was the best we could do at the time. We were making miles.

Bogota is on a high plateau, and there was a very long descent out of Bogota. There were lots of overheated cars on the uphill side, parked on the side of the road.

It was a long, long bus ride to Armenia and the last two hours seemed to take forever. When we finally arrived in Armenia, we took a taxi to the hostel and went to bed right away, even though we hadn't eaten much other than chips (with Tazos) and snacks all day. We were just too tired. We were in the six bed dorm, and there were supposed to be four other people showing up later, but they never did, and we ended up having six bed dorm to ourselves and slept very well.

We slept in a bit to try and recover from the journey, showered, and ate breakfast at the cafe downstairs. We had a slow morning trying to plan ahead a little. We looked up accommodations in Salento, but couldn't decide where we wanted to stay, so we just made a list of places we'd check once we got there.

Our hostel told us we could catch the bus to Salento at a nearby bus stop instead of going all the way back to the terminal. But after three full Salento bound buses went by and wouldn't stop to pick us up, we just gave up and hopped on a city bus that said terminal.

We got on a Salento bus right away and headed out on the short 45 minute bus ride.



Armenia seems nice enough, and the hostel was pretty nice and in a nicer part of town. I think it's probably the only hostel I don't think there's much going on in Armenia, but it gives convenient access to the Zona Cafetera. And the people were nice, and you could drink the tap water! Neato!

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