The boarder!

It took me and Kirsty 6 hours to cross the boarder. Absolute nightmare! By a weird twist, Malvin had left his hard drive in the hostel in San Agustin and he had to go back for it. The up shot for him was he ended up on the night bus across the Trampoline, got to the boarder super early, bribes is way to the front of the queue and ended up in the hostel 12 hours before us. We had to get a shite hostel close to the bus station, to get going early the next day. Another reason for hanging around was to go and see the church at Ipiales. It’s something to behold!
We got to Ipiales terminal, ditched our bags, and headed in a collectivo taxi to the church. Luckily it’s 15 minutes away, so an easy thing to do, and worth it. The only drawback was that it put us into primed queuing time at the boarder.
With all boarders you need to check out of one country, then into another, standard right? This was not really different. The only thing was, here, there were 3 queues, one for families, one for people with passports and then a huuuuuge queue for Venezuelan nationals traveling on ID cards. These queues then went into the building to 4 windows, crazy! Later, once we got inside the building after 4 hours of queuing, that there were also people checking into the country too. This queue was tiny, but they held everyone outside. People were queuing for hours when they could have just walked in. Bah!
We got within touching distance of the front of the line, literally 4 people in front of us, then the window shut and he guy disappeared. I’d say there were about 500 people queuing for the window that was now shut. Great! The Venezuelan line was close to 1200 people outside, it was crazy!
We cleared out, finally, and headed over to the Panama side. The plan was to get to Quito before it got dark. The sun had already gone down before we crossed the bridge.
It took us 5 minutes to check in and find a bus to Tulcán. We then lucked out and found a bus to Quito, it was going to be another late check in! Finally got to bed at 1:30am, that was a long travel day. Good job we were in the Masaya hostel with awesome beds, the same people who had the awesome place in San Agustin, good planning!Read more