How to spend all day on a bus, multiple days a week

21 days in Colombia. Sounds like a reasonable amount of time.

That is, until you subtract the number of hours, which add up to a number of days, spent doing nothing but driving from point A to point B.

We spend the equivalent of whole working days, sometimes even longer, sitting on our asses, alternating between screens: iPhone screens, iPod screens, iPad screens, and kindle screens.

Sometimes we even kick it old school by looking out the window screen, a hard-copy novel or PC laptop.

To pass the time I've read 3 novels in 3 weeks - which I would never have had the time for as an employed person.

Other people take it as an excuse opportunity for binging on movies and TV series. So if I suddenly stop blogging, it's probably because I've succumbed to watching Game of Thrones. I've watched the first episode and still have yet to feign any interest.

Our hybrid travel bus/truck vehicle has two built-in tables on which the crew will sometimes play card games, although I am so sensitive to motion-sickness I do everyone a favour by sitting out.

Combined with winding roads, dirt roads, one-way bridges, roadwork and traffic - it's not hard for ETAs to become stretched and re-stretched.

But it was worth it.

The old towns are so picture-perfect I often felt like I was on a movie set. Its colours leak into the neighbourhoods: houses with cement walls have exterior coats of unabashed fluorescent pink, lime green and taxi cab yellow.

I'm putting this charmer of a country on my list of favourites :)

From Queenstown, NZ to San Gil, Colombia: What they don't tell you about adventure towns

They're advertised as hotspots for adrenaline junkies. Such towns are gifted with the kind of cliffs that are perfect for jumping off, skies with a view worth falling into, or the kind of river you can't not raft through.

Skydiving had always been on my list of 'to do' things since I was 16. A friend suggested waiting till I was older (i.e. richer) and do it in Queenstown, NZ - because apparently it was THE place in the world to skydive. I figured that if I was only ever going to do it once in my life, I may as well go all out.

Eight years later a travel buddy suggested our next stop be South Island, New Zealand. One of the cities we'd be passing through was Queenstown, adventure capital of NZ.

My time had come.

I had never been happier to part ways with so much money, nor more enthused to sign a death disclosure form. They drove us about half an hour out of town to a small airport, where a plane was waiting to whisk us 15, 000 metres above ground… so we could fall most of the way back down.

Just as they were about to fit us into gear, I was delivered one of the biggest blows in my life.

Despite perfect conditions that morning, the wind had suddenly picked up just enough to hit danger level.

My dream was postponed till the next day.

Except the next day, it was raining.

The day after that, our tour was moving on to another city. So my dream was pretty much cancelled on me. As a constant reminder of my pain, I spent weeks afterward trying to get my money back.

I was disheartened, to say the least. Majority of the reason for my going to NZ (apart from intentions of visiting a friend who also conveniently bailed), was to skydive. My hard earned, long awaited adventure holiday suddenly lost its purpose.

What the brochures don't tell you is that for every skydive that goes ahead - there are a handful of broken hearts that don't get to go.

I numbed the pain with other activities like glacier hiking, white water rafting, speed boating, and swimming with the dolphins.

Perhaps the greatest risk in travelling especially for adventure sport is that it may not even go ahead. I've since learned to balance anticipation and excitement with a healthy level of expectation and acceptance of unfavourable conditions.

Putting this into practice a second time around came a lot sooner than I thought.

Just this week my South America tour stopped by San Gil - adventure capital of Colombia, for 2 days. On the first day  I had booked myself in for repelling 200m down a waterfall, until the unrelenting rain said 'no.' The following day I decided to paraglide for 15 minutes through Chicamocha Canyon. Speaking too soon thinking it was finally my lucky day, the wind died down after just 5 minutes; which was 5 minutes more than the multitude of people still left in line behind me, whose plans of paragliding at all that day were shattered.

Where you can help it, I'd recommend spending at least a week in any adventure capital to allow for the rescheduling of cancelled activities due to poor weather. With that said however, during peak periods this may not be so easy if every slot for the next few days is already full to the brim with other hopefuls.

Take these things with a smile, and always look for a silver lining. It may force you to consider other activities you would have otherwise never intended doing, or if you really need to scrape for a morsel of comfort - at least you didn't die. Even dare devils have a safety limit.

Sometimes it just isn't meant to be, it just happens to be a lot more than any fancy website or glossy brochure will care to admit.

Love, Noeline

xox

The time I finally got to skydive, at North Wollongong.

Sucking it up in South America

Experiencing the beauty of South America comes with some first-world trade-offs. Here's 10.

Right thigh: 3 of 20+ mosquito bites I'm currently suffering. Numbing the pain with anti-itch cream and Lonely Planet.

1. Mosquitoes
They're everywhere. Compared to mosquitoes in Australia, their South American counterparts are a lot stealthier. You don't realise you've been bitten until after they've had their full of your glorious gringo blood and fled.
My bites tended to be itchiest on days 2-5 before calming the fuck down.
A friend on the tour was adamant that her repellent was attracting mosquitoes instead of deterring them. So she experimented and went a night without it. Mission failed.
Use repellent and suffer 10 bites instead of 20.

2. Lack of insect repellent
You think they'd be stocked in most supermarkets. They're not. Head to the pharmacy and stock up there.

3. You will be on a constant search for bottled water
Be prepared to go through about one million of these whilst on your quest to stay hydrated. You can't drink tap water here (unless you're trying to make yourself sick, by which means go right ahead). In some places the tap water will actually have an orange tinge to it. Buy 5L bottles from the supermarket to refill smaller ones to carry with you during the day.

4. Few hot showers
When it's hot, cold showers aren't so bad. When it's cold, you start reassessing the urgency of needing to take one at all.

5. No toilet paper
Most public bathrooms don't have toilet paper. Always carry a packet of pocket tissues with you. Take spare toilet paper rolls from hostels/hotels and use that.

Some bathrooms charge a small usage fee. There'll usually be a lady at the front entrance collecting fares, but on the plus side this means they're more well-kept and toilet paper is provided.

6. No toilet seats
This may not be such a problem for boys doing a number one. Girls, practice your squats because you'll be doing a lot of "the hover."

7. No running tap for which to wash your hands
Carry wipes or hand sanitizer with you. You don’t want season your next meal with toilet germs.

8. Being charged gringo (tourist) prices VS them not having enough change to give you due to the huge ass notes dispensed by ATMs
It's a catch-22. As tourists, it's in our interest to withdraw larger amounts to reduce the amount of transaction fees. Yet we end up with wads of the biggest notes possible. Then we struggle to make small purchases because no one has enough change to give us, so we either:

(i) buy lots of crap that adds up to a larger, more acceptable amount;

(ii) sadly go without street food (usually mystery questionable meat on a stick); 

(iii) be happily overcharged in the name of street food. In the grand scheme of things, this will usually only be a few dollars, if not a few cents; or

(iv) pay as a group, followed by hours of discussion trying to work out who owes who how much.

At the artisan markets in Otavalo, the starting price of pretty much everything for tourists was $22US. This meant a lot of the things I could get cheaper back home. Stand your ground and bargain. What we will eventually settle for as a fair price, will still be more than what an Ecuadorian travelling domestically would be charged. By paying a little extra, you can help support the local community without being completely taken for a ride.

9. No English
Be patient, take it as a challenge and opportunity to learn Spanish. Either that or learn to treat the ambiguity as an adventure.

10. The locals will stare at you

It was a hot day and my tour group (there was 11 of us) decided to cool down at the local pool. There were a handful of locals already in the water, but the moment we went to join them they all hopped out. I'm not sure if it was out of courtesy, or if it just conveniently happened to be lunch time. They lined the perimeter of the pool, took to their packed lunches and watched us frolic. Within minutes, word about us had spread, and parents and grandparents had also gathered round. 

They don't mean any harm, it's more of a friendly curiosity. They will try speaking with you in the hope that you know more Spanish than they do English (which is little to none at all).

Or it could just be the fact that you're wearing shorts and Havianas despite it being cold and raining.

Love, Noeline

xox