I now have a most hated animal... The rooster. I always thought that my first meal after I get back to Australia would be a slice of Vegemite toast, however after the last couple of nights my first stop may actually be red rooster!!
Again, the rooster was in fine form last night. I think the first cock-a-doodle-doo was rung out at 1am. It started up again just before 4am, and continued on his frequent calls for the remainder of the morning!!! Rrrrrr.
We negotiated the shower times quite well again this morning, and I even had enough time to call home!! Which was great.
Soon after breakfast, we all grabbed our bags, checked out of the hotel and started walking our way towards the bus stop. Up and down the steep hills and negotiating the road works is all in a days work for us seasoned travellers now!
We didn't have to wait long for a bus to arrive, as within 10mins of arriving at the bus stop, we had packed our bags in the boot of the little bus, and were happily sitting in our seats.
We were driven the hour or so back to Armenia, however this time we had the pleasure of seeing the countryside. We had missed out on seeing the landscape last time as it was dark, and we were too busy watching the bus driver crush all the contents in our bags.
We made our way through Armenia, until we eventually arrived at the same bus terminal we were at a couple of days ago. The only near escape we had on this trip was nearly T boning a coca cola truck, who decided that stop signs don't actually mean stop!!
We wheeled our bags through the terminal, and eventually Andres lead us trough the magical door, that looked like nothing from where we were standing, however behind lay a magical land of buses and passenger waiting areas.
We walked straight out to the buses, and again put our bags in to the boot of a waiting little bus that would take us all the way to Popayan.
We climbed aboard the 22 seater bus, and again Donna and I managed to score seats next to each other!! This should make for a good bus trip. I packed my carry on bag in the overhead bag storage and sat down on the aisle seat.
As I looked around, I found the bus decorations quite amusing. The headrest covers looked like massive pairs of blue undies stretched over each of the seats. I then looked up the front of the bus, to see a huge grey shaggy wool seat cover covering the passenger seat, and matching grey shaggy wool tassels dangling all along the top of the bus windscreen. To top it off, there were grey fluffy dice hung over the rear vision mirror. So today I have decided that our buses name shall be Woolley mammoth.
The bus was filled to capacity, and the bus driver and the bus company official separately completed the official head count of the passengers on the bus many times over. Obviously one of them couldn't count properly. Eventually counting together they managed to come up with a satisfactory head count. Only once the official head count paperwork was completed we were off.
Soon after we set off, the driver turned on his Latin salsa music to the highest possible sound setting. The speakers and sub woofer were blaring away behind us, do we really have 5 hours of this music to look forward to???
Occasionally I could hear a soft meowing in between the heavy bass and dance beats pumping from the speakers. Is that a cat?? I started searching for it... However I couldn't see any obvious signs of a cat. Maybe it's part of the music. Once the next song sounded, and I heard the meow again, I realised that this meowing was not part of the music. So I commenced my cat search again. I turned around to find a young boy with his grandmother in the back seat of the bus. He had a huge smile on his face. I pointed at him with a big smile on my face and said el gato? He giggled and said si. The cat mystery was solved!! I should have been a slooth.
We drove out of town, and soon hit the open roads. Again we were surrounded by green rolling hills, however instead of being able to sit back and enjoy the views, I was more concerned with trying to avoid being squashed by the leaning tower of Dimitry. Dim had taken up occupancy in the seat across from me. Soon after we started driving along the open roads, the bus had rocked Dim off to sleep. I must say, there is nothing more scary than seeing a 150kg man mountain sleep leaning towards you, looking like he is not going to stop. The only thing saving me was the gap of the aisle and the arm rest, which he had thankfully pulled down!! The only thing that could top off this scenario was when he started to snore. This man was killing me. Occasionally his sleepy arm would flick around, and on a number of occasions ended up brushing against my leg.... I'm about to lose my s***!! My saviour was when the bus came to a stop for a bathroom break, thankfully Dim woke up.
Back on the bus, we continued on our way, and quite quickly I again found Dim asleep in the seat across from me. However this time he was leaning towards the window, rather than me. Reprieve!!
I got back to enjoying the scenery. After driving for approximately 3 hours, we soon found that we were no longer driving down the mountains, rather we had started driving across the valley, filled with paddock after paddock of sugar cane crops.
This is about when my restless legs, aching back and boredom set in. Donna asked Andres how much longer we had before we would reach our final destination.... and this is where the Andres moving goal post of times started. We had been told yesterday that the bus trip would take 5 hours, so you could imagine our surprise that after 3.5 hrs into this bus trip Andres told us it would be another 3 to 4 hours. What?!?!? That's crazy!!!
Soon after we drove past a sign, it told me that to Popayan there was 150km to go, there is no way it's going to take another 3 or 4 hours to do that. I calculate another 2 hours tops.
The drive today did seem very long. I don't know if it was the fact that I didn't have the in bus entertainment system to play movies for me on the entire trip, or whether it was the fact that the weather was really warming up, and there was no air conditioning to keep us cool. Again, it was the manual air conditioner for us again today... open windows.
We started to get closer to Popayan, and we started to drop passengers off. The cat boy and his grandmother soon negotiated a place for the bus driver to let them off, and as the boy got off the bus, I realised that he also had a hashem bag in his hands with something moving in it. What the hell... did he put the cat into the hashem bag?? But then I heard clucking coming from bag.... Holly crap, this pair had a whole farm yard on the bus!! So not only were this real life Bonnie and Clyde smuggling a cat on board our bus, they were also smuggling a chicken too. What a pair hey!!
We made our way through town, and finally arrived at the bus terminal. Taking our bags out of the bus boot, we made our way to the taxi stand. Andres tried multiple times to get taxis to take us to our hotel, each time they looked at us, and saw our big bags, refusing to take us. Andres had to do some hard talking to finally get 3 taxi drivers to agree to take us to the hotel.
How I have missed the total traffic anarchy that you can only find in Latin America. Traffic lights mean nothing in this town.... obviously it's a guide rather than the law. We dodged and weaved our way through town, and were let off at the end of the road that our hotel was located on. Normally taxis would drop us off out the front of the hotel, however as the street was closed for road works we didn't have much choice other than to walk up the very narrow sidewalks with our bags. At times the path was so narrow my big bag hardly fit down.
We arrived at the hotel, threw our bags in our rooms and made our way back down to the foyer. It was now 3pm, and we were all starving for lunch.
We were meant to do an orientation walk for Popayan, however if Andres didn't take us to lunch first, I think he soon would have become our lunch.
Andres took us to a restaurant specialising in chicken. So what did Donna and I order, pork. Everyone else ordered their chicken. With every order comes a bowl of soup. So as we waited for our main lunch to arrive, we started to eat the soup that was placed in front of us. We all happily sipped our soup, spoon after spoon, the chicken broth was quite yummy. I then dug a little deeper with my spoon, and down the bottom I felt some chicken. Hungrily I grabbed a spoonful of chicken, and as it popped up out of the surface I almost screamed. This was no ordinary bowl of chicken soup, it had soon turned into the bowl of gristly horrors, as a chicken foot and gizzards sat on my spoon. I dropped the spoon and it's contents back into the bowl. I tried to eat my soup, however the chicken feet had now surfaced to the top of the soup, and I just couldn't do it.
My main lunch soon arrived anyway, and I was more than happy to push my bowl of soup away and to tuck into my pork schnitzel and salad!!!
With fully bellies, we then set off on our orientation walk of Popayan. What a contrast from the last town we were in. We went from a small rainbow town, to a large busy white town. There were a large number of very old buildings, especially around the town square, all of which had been painted white. Here we stood and admired the buildings and listened as Andres gave us some history into this town.
As we stood there listening to Andres, a homeless man came up and started hassling us for money. Andres tried to move us away, however he was very persistent, and followed us. It wasn't until the man mountain Dim turned round and pointed at him saying 'no' in his best Russian voice did he flee!!
We continued on our tour. We tried some of the local fruit, looked trough the university of arts, and checked out a few of the towns monuments, before being let loose in the town.
Donna and I walked around for a while, and soon decided that we would have a fairly quiet night tonight. We ended up calling past a corner store, picking up a few snacks and heading back to the hotel for a movie night.
Some of the tour group ended up going our for dinner, however we were still so full from lunch that there was no way we were going out to eat another full meal.
Instead we watched 'catch me if you can' in Spanish, and then found an English movie 'reality bites'. By the time these films finished it was time to call it a night!!