Day 9 - 10 – Our night in the Bogota airport

After our dinner at the Cevicheria Lauren and I went back to the hotel to clean up before our flight to Bogota. Of course the Hilton in Cartegena would be participating in the hour for the earth and every light in the entire hotel was out and everything was lit by candle light.  We took quick showers and then jumped in a cab to head off to the airport. As our luck would have it we got another interesting cab driver, this one lived in Colorado (so he spoke great English) but that also meant he spent the entire cab ride telling us about his crazy religion, how he tried to be a monk, his divorce, his plan for the future, and the way he wanted to die. When he passed the airport enterance and started reaching for his glove box I thought Lauren and I were in for a lot of trouble, but he was just absent minded and wanted to pass along his card incase he could be of any help to us. We jumped out of the cab and headed straight into the airport to see if we could grab an earlier flight. Security in Colombia is surprisingly minimal and we hustled onto a flight boarding in 5 min. As we were boarding the flight we noticed numerous people taking pictures of themselves on the tarmac, climbing the stairs to the plane and then inside. We kept commenting that this would be the airport that we could board the wrong flight since everyone just kept pushing us in one direction. Lauren kept asking every employee we saw along the way to make sure we were headed to Bogota. Lauren and I had a good  laugh about our adventure getting to the airport and then we sat in our seats which literally were so far back on the flight we boarded through the back door. We landed in the domestic terminal and needed to get to the international terminal for our next flight. When we asked how we get to the next terminal we were told that we needed to take a taxi. Lauren and I looked at each other wondering how far away could this terminal be and then we found out it was 10,000 pesos equaling almost eight dollars. So we got into the taxi line waited to get a taxi and then when we told them where we wanted to go they literally looked at us like we were crazy. But we drove the 2 min drive to the next terminal, got out, paid the 10,000 pesos and hurried to Copa to check in our bags for our flight the next morning. Unfortunately, they closed and we were forced to hang out in the Bogota airport all night with all our stuff. We picked a seat with close proximity to the outlets and hunkered down with our laptop and ipads. Lauren had plugged her Boss headset charger literally 5 steps from where were sitting and within 10 minutes someone had stolen it. On the bright slide Lauren made friends with every police officer in the airport and we had our own personal surveillance for the rest of the night. What can you expect from the 3^rd most dangerous city in the world. Our night in the airport went pretty quickly, we watched movies on our ipad, ate McDonalds sundaes, mcflurries, McMuffins, and Mcd Arepas (yes we went to McDonalds twice within 5 hours). Once 3 am came around we could check our bags in and we tried to head through customs. So security within Colombia is pretty easy, but security to leave the country is almost impossible. We went through the traditional bag check process where our luggage was scanned, than we went through a stage where everything in our carryon was sniffed (literally everything was pulled out and smelled) then we were patted down and finally allowed to board the airplane to Panama. So we thought we were clear of anymore screening, but this was not the case at all. Once we got to Panama we had 40 minutes to deplane and get onto our flight to NY. We once again waited in line to have all our carryon inspected; they wouldn’t even let Lauren take the water she bought in the airport on the plane. Comfortably in our seats ready to head of the NY I finally began to have faith that we would make it to the NY before the 5 pm deadline to pick up the tickets.