Colombia: Travel Fails & Tips

TIPS:

Colombia has gotten a bad rep in the media because of all the Pablo Escobar business. But people there have worked really hard for the last 20 years to make their country a better place! In my travels in South America, I have found Colombia to be the safest and warmest country. Many people won’t love tourists coming and expecting to see Narcos scenes, so don’t be obnoxios.

Claro is by far the best phone network you can get connected to here. For 65k pesos, I used internet liberally for the whole month I was there with no issues. Go to a grocery store and ask for a SIM card and they’ll replace and set up the phone for you.

Cash > card unless you’re in a very touristy or fancy area.

Postobon drink company runs the country groceries almost. Their logos are all over, so sodas from Postobon will always be readily available. Exito is the biggest grocery chain, and there you can always pay with card.

“Toca que” is a term that was used widely in the Santander region (I don’t know if it extends past that). It means “I/you/we/she/he/etc has to”. It’s a shorter way to say “tener que” and no conjugation necessary!

Some people at the airport will tell you that you need to buy a visitor’s pass to go to Santa Marta. This is a LIE. You don’t need anything special to visit any city in Colombia!

Buses in Colombia are definitely coming, but they will probably not abide by the time table that you looked up online. So don’t depend too much on it!

Buses will often also honk to let you know that they are there and going to pass you (so that you be careful). But I found that the honking shocked me that i froze instead of moving out of the way. derp.

Colombians talk pretty fast, but people on the coast in Colombia talk a lot faster.

Food here tends to be on the more bland side, and is often fried. Especially if you are trying to avoid getting sick from food, you won’t be having a lot of fresh vegetables.

FAIL STORIES:

As amazing my time was in Colombia, I had my fare share of struggles besides the expected communication barrier with my American Spanish.

Not off to a good start:

Not Colombia related, but first, I missed my flight out of LAX. There I was, bright and early at the airport two hours before my flight departure time. I sit by the screen that said my gate number, and I am sitting there watching White Collar. The minutes go by, and my boarding time comes but nothing is happening at my gate, so I assume the flight is just delayed. My departure time gets close, and I still see no news, no line, no attendants at the gate and google tells me the flight is on time. So I am walking around, asking, and they tell me the plane departed! Turns out at LAX, this gate was at a corner. The screen I was next to displayed my gate, but people were lined up around the corner. How. out. rageous. Thankfully, United booked me on a different flight out the next day, and I had built in a buffer day in Iquitos, Peru so my plans were only a bit modified.

Then in LAX I had to find a hostel and get some dinner. And of course, after I pay for my dinner, I leave my credit card there. I had brought multiple cards, but the reserve is just infinitely better a card to spend. I only notice that I am missing this card when I get to Mexico — RIP — but thankfully Chase pulls through and sent me a new card to my hostel in Iquitos!

Spider bite:

Now for the Colombia related story. The first few weeks in Iquitos, I have been bitten my unknown bugs and wondered if I would die in the Amazon jungle — but I didn’t. In my hostel in Bogota, I got bit by some bug while sleeping, and it was a whole new level of itchiness — so itchy that it hurt. I slept on, assuming it was some super strong jungle mosquito. Throughout the day, my hand swelled up.. And kept swelling up, until I could not bend my little finger. But that’s fine. I went to bed, but woke up at 3 AM due to the intense pain in my hand! I was planning to fly out of Bogota to a small town that same day, so I figured it would be better to go to a hospital in the capital city of Colombia where the hospitals would be modern and safe.

Wrong. But probably still better than Barrancabermeja, which was my flight destination.

I get into a taxi and go to the nearest hospital, which is in a clearly bad neighborhood. I get out of the car, and explain to someone through a barred door that I am there for the emergency room. I get led into an outdoor canopy tent structure, where they take my passport information and a summary of why I am there. Then the guy there directs me to the actual hospital building. There, I push the limits of my spanish skills to talk about insurance and describe physical pains. I get led in to the triage room, and my doctor is a med student who speaks some English! Hooray! He seems to have no idea what bit me, but tells me I will get a hydrocortisol shot (makes sense) and some oral medication prescription. I get led into a different room for my shot, but the nurse fills the syringe and doesn’t remove the bubbles. As someone not in the medical field but with basic biology education, I start to question everything because I thought bubbles in my vein meant death, but he says it’s fine.

Then he sticks the needle in, and then draws some blood so that it mixes with the solution in the syringe, and then pushes it back in. At this point, I am wondering if I will die in the hospital. I go find the English speaking med student and demand that he explain what the bubbles and the blood in-n-out businesses were, but he just says that is how it is done. I leave the hospital not completely satisfied, but not particularly fearing for my life either. Google doesn’t clarify, but my older sister (med student) tells me I will most likely be okay, so I relax.

The cool thing, though, is that the whole visit cost me around $14.

By the time I got back to my hostel, breakfast was being served. So while munching on my food, I noticed that my hand has not deflated much. Being the person I am, I start to share my problems with all the strangers in the living room, just wanting to complain about life. Then, bless my soul, one of the staff working at the hostel is a doctor from Venezuela! She asks me what happened and what they did at the hospital, declaring my bite a spider bite after a quick observation. So I pull out the paper, and read that I had gotten 100mg of hydrocortisol, but turns out, for adults 500mg is the norm amount! No wonder my swelling wasn’t going down. So I dread having to go back to that awful hospital, but this doctor is wonderwoman. She pulls out her medical kit — complete with a syringe and a vial of hydrocortisol. She taps out the bubbles and everything, pulls me into the hostel hallway bathroom, and gave me a shot in my butt. Amazing.

Lost Phone:

I am a millennial. Clearly. I am not addicted to my phone in the sense that I always have to check instagram or snapchat things. But I am very dependent on my phone. For maps, contacts, calendars, photos, alarms, emails — I’m using it all. All my emergency info, offline docs, travel details are on my phone and during traveling, this is my identification and connection to the world. And being a good software engineer, I had two factor authentication on to text to my phone. But since I was using a Colombian SIM card, I set the text to send to my Google voice number instead of my US number. Dumb me.

Then as I was getting out of my taxi at the Bogota airport, I must have left my phone in the car. I looked back as I got out to see if I had left anything, and my phone must have either fallen or blended in with the black seat, since I didn’t see anything. I started checking in at the counter, and after frantically looking through all of my bags, confirmed that I did not have my phone. I tried calling with payphones but no one picked up, tried asking random airport agents to try to use their cell phone, contacted lost and found, asked random taxi drivers if they knew anyone named willy, talked to the police, and in the end I sat down and cried in the middle of the airport.

Dejectedly, I go through security and go to the lounge to use a tablet, and I realize — I can’t log in to my google account because of the two factor authentication. I can’t access my emails, photos, contacts, saved map locations, google docs. Nada. Thankfully, I forwarded my travel plan doc to a few friends and Zaid pulled through and forwarded me the link, so I was able to access most of my info. But Google did not pull through, because for weeks, they kept telling me that they could not verify my account no matter what information I tried to provide them.

In the end, Aakash pulled through with my computer that I had left at his house, and sending a account recovery request from my laptop worked (since I had logged into that account on my laptop before).

Another lesser factor to this issue was that I could not replace my Pixel 2 phone in Colombia. Those phones are not for sale there :c But I did find a large mall, and they had iPhones. For comparable photo quality, I would have to buy the iPhone X, but that was going to cost me $1500 USD. So I bought an iPhone 6 that was on sale for $400 USD, and the rest of my photos were just so tragically awful quality. Made me not want to take photos anymore, so sadly, my Medellin and Argentina photos are lacking and low quality.

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”666"]

the last photo I took of my phone. it was having issues tbh.[/caption]

A clutch thing I did do right though, is bringing a Steripen. It is a water treatment (UV water purifier) device that treats a bottle of water in about a minute! I did get the poopy days in Colombia, but managed to keep it to a minimum thanks to clean water.