Just so you don't think our whole life is fun and games, I'm going to tell you about our expedition across the Colombian border.

We got dropped off from the jungle into lago agrio, a sketchy city at around 2pm; our night bus wasn't until 11pm so that was a lot of time to kill. Our new friend Tara, (who travelled all of Colombia with us so I'll mention her from the beginning) also turned up to buy her ticket and we killed a few hours in the bus terminal, which was tiny and incredibly boring. At around 5:30, a German girl called Emily who Tara had met on her amazon trip walked into the bus terminal. She was staying with a local family in lago agrio and one of the family members was buying a bus ticket to Quito for that night.

He felt sorry for us and so told Emily that we could all pile in his car and they would take us around town. We really had nothing else to do and Emily had stayed with them for a week so we didn't feel like we would be murdered we all chose to go for the drive.

The guy, Carlos spoke very very little English, but luckily Emily translated everything he had to say. We ended up driving to the outskirts of the city to a place where there were loads of clubs in the middle of nowhere. It was 6pm when we arrived, hot and sweaty from being in the amazon and up at 5:00am this morning! Apparently the clubs start in the afternoon and finish at 8pm. Very early.

The first one we went in had a guy talk over the music constantly and since we were something of an attraction he mentioned gringos a lot of times and tried to get us up dancing. It was salsa dancing and none of us were too keen to get up but it was fun to watch everyone else. The men here love dancing probably more the the women which is weird compared to back home. We were all buying rounds which were cheap when a beer cost $1.50 and for some reason the 'cool' drink to buy was non alcoholic beer.

We then got accosted by some very drunk ladies who looked like toads that were drinking the regular beer so we moved onto a new club where Carlos ran into some friends. This club was mostly outdoors, which isn't great as it sits on the edge of a RAINforest, and so unsurprisingly started to piss it down. My hiking boots were soaked! We all ended up dancing; (those non alcoholic beers were getting to our heads!) whilst Carlos' friends took lots of pictures and kept asking us questions even though we had no idea what they were saying. At around 8, when the club was ending Carlos and Emily then took us to the best chicken, rice and chips in the town. And it tasted just like all the other chicken, rice and chips to be honest!

At 9:30 we were back in the same seats in the bus station but by now we didn't have long to wait. We were all so thankful Emily had invited us for that little excursion!

The night bus was fine, it even had a toilet which was a bonus. We all went to sleep pretty much straight away, about an hour and a half into the trip some army men woke us up and we had to get out at a check point with our passports. We were very irritated. Again we tried to get some sleep on a crazy bus where the bus driver feels like he's in a rally car and enjoys overtaking on blind bends that one one side has a fifty foot cliff drop. At 2am we stopped, we assumed, at some bus stop because some people got on but that wasn't the case. Now that it was stationary we actually got some sleep for a while. I woke up needed to pee and managed to get all the way to the back to find out the toilet door was locked(?!) To then make it all the way to the front to find we were locked in. The bus still wasn't moving but as we were due to get in super early at 6:30, I appreciated that we might be a few hours late and went back to sleep. At 6 we all woke to find we were in the middle of nowhere and everyone was getting off the bus. People tried to tell us what was going on by making whistling noises and hand movements but we didn't understand so we grabbed our bags and followed everyone else.

When we turned the corner we realised that they were trying to tell us there had been a landslide and it was blocking the road. The only way to get across was to walk across and hope that the landslide didn't start again. A local guy told us when to go, we feel they were used to this kind of thing and off we went, it was muddy and slippy so we didn't go to fast and then had to climb over big rocks and a fallen tree trunk. We could hear rocks falling but kept our eyes on the road ahead and made it safely past! Scary! We the got on another bus that was on the other side of the landslide. It was with a different company so we had to pay again and realised we were still 4 hours away!

This driver was much slower and the road was crazy with tiny little bridges with no walls to cross. I'm glad we actually did this part in the day with a competent driver and not in the night time.

Eventually we made it to the border town and had a breakfast of, you guessed it, chicken, rice and chips served by a guy who looked like he was off to prom ( had a bow tie and everything). We took a taxi to the border and got safely stamped out and into Colombia! Hooray! It was after 11 now so we were very behind schedule. We wanted to go to a cathedral that was close by this border town and got in a taxi that completely ripped us off to go see this cathedral. It is situated in a valley and looks like it should be in Switzerland or something which was cool. The downside which we didn't realise from the word valley was we had to walk with our big bags all downhill to go see it and as it was Sunday morning it was absolutely packed! Then came the inevitable but horrible trek back up the hill which required three stops and Dan nearly breaking his back to jump back in a taxi to take us to the bus station. When we arrived there was one leaving in 5 mins so we bought some quick empanadas and jumped onto the mini bus. This was alright it even had an unlocked toilet! The journey was meant to take 8 hours which would get us in at 9pm. A very very long day travelling. They put on a crappy Adam Sandler film and then a film about human trafficking in Latin America, just the sort of thing you want to see in Colombia, it was very violent even thought there were kids on board they don't seem to care. About half way through we stopped at the side of the road for a good hour an a half, the only reason we can decipher is because the driver had friends nearby who he fancied a chat with. Then in the next town we stopped yet again at some sort of restaurant for an hour, we weren't meant to travel this leg at night and it was already past 9 so we had no idea how long it would take to get to Popayan, we were getting angry.

The final film was the impossible about the Thailand tsunami and made me scared of water but it was good as you didn't really need to know what people were saying to each other!! We finally made it to Popayan unscathed at quarter to twelve at night. The place was absolutely dead and we hadn't booked anywhere. We headed to the first place in the lonely planet but when we got there we were told it was full and to try around the corner, finally they had space and we could all get a shower and use the WiFi! We finally made it at about 1am so in total about 35 hours from when we were dropped off by the jungle people!