And off we go...

Day 1

Location: London, Madrid, Bogota 

Hostel: Kranky Croc hostel - yes, really.

Leaving Norwich at 4pm yesterday feels pretty far away right now as I write this from my fairly comfortable and very welcome bed in Bogota, a full 36 hours later. 

The wonderful hostess, our friend Raj kindly put us up for the first night of our transatlantic adventure. Our brigade of three were meeting for the first time which all went fluidly and we managed to get a wholesome 2.5 hours sleep before taxiing to heathrow. Travelling with STA, the student friendly travel agency, we were kindly advised to arrive three hours before our flight. Slightly ill-advised as the checkin desk didn't open until 2 hours before... But at least we were there. 

The first leg, London > Madrid went without fault and Spain receive a five star rating on its flight-transfer efficiency (a highly coveted rating I'm sure) where we promptly arrived to board the long haul flight to Bogota, capital of Colombia.

I'm not going to lie, Iberia airways are not the classiest of airlines and our ambitious hopes of having individual tv screens with lots of entertainment were quickly scuppered. Instead we got a small grainy TV screen about 10 metres away. Thank god the shows provided were brilliant, with an extensive biography on Ben Kingsley (of all people?!) followed by one on the varied and exciting career of Sandra bullock. 

The hobbit (aweful) and cirque de soleil followed this, two visual epics a little wasted on the miniscule screen but Lizzie and I were glad of the entertainment while Bean proceeded to accomplish a full 9 hours sleep! Some slightly dramatic turbulence and 11 hours later we landed safely, got through security and celebrated the relative simplicity of the journey. Luckily our bags too arrived safely so we set off to find our prebooked kranky croc hostel.

Like moths to a flame a couple of other English backpackers quickly sought us out as looking foreign, so we made our introductions like a prebooked tour group and bypassed the taxi-hailing gauntlet to share a nice authorised taxi to the hostel. Kranky croc seems to have everything you'd need, beds, wifi, 'drinking tap water' [we'll see about that!],  and as a lonely planet endorsed place, we found many others like ourselves. I must say I felt quite relaxed (for me) and immediately at home.

While an understandably very tired Lizzie went to catch a well deserved 40 winks, bean and I went to get some food with the afforementioned taxi-sharers, Shane and nick. A huge plate of meat and chips later (one particular order being a rather suspect looking sausage with two potatoes) we called it a night, bedding down at 9pm (3am English time). Overall day 1 was pretty smooth and I have a good feeling about the rest of the trip :)

Apologies for any spelling/ grammar mistakes - this is being done on an iPod so a little awkward!