1st Dec Rather lazily killing a bit of time and saw an old Techmoan review of the Tiltpod, a fairly nifty looking pocket "tripod" which allows you to mount either a compact camera or a smartphone at an angle (it isn't actually a tripod as it has no legs). I have no idea if this is still available. It is vaguely tempting to consider either replacing my Gorillapod with one or to use one as part of a "don't take a compact camera with me, just use my smartphone" strategy.
The Gorillapod is not terribly heavy, I'm not concerned about its larger physical size and it is probably a lot more flexible (no pun intended). I don't use it a lot, but as I've said before I do like to use it for taking photos out of the windows or off the balconies of my accommodation, so it doesn't seem ridiculous to be taking it with me. A compact camera Tiltpod would probably replace 50-75% of its functionality at a lower weight, but the saving in weight wouldn't be huge and I would be losing something. (Although I've not done it before, I've also seen a suggestion that a Gorillapod or similar tripod can be used as a stand to prop up a smartphone for watching videos on; on the last trips I was reduced to trying to contrive something out of miscellaneous items.)
There's no denying being able to hold a smartphone steady at an angle would help reduce my desire to have a separate compact camera, which would be quite a weight saving by the time you get rid of not just the camera but the battery charger and cable and spare battery. But as I've said before, I often feel a lot safer/more relaxed about pulling my compact camera out in random public spaces than I do pulling my smartphone out - I'd much rather have the camera snatched out of my hand than my phone. And I'd still be worried about the smartphone falling out of the window and being lost/damaged, whereas the compact camera has a wrist strap I can use to guard against that. And there's the optical zoom too.
Anyway, just making a note to help remind me in future if I want to consider alternatives in this area.
8th Dec I went over to Decathlon at Canada Water yesterday; got some synthetic socks and a couple of 70% merino 30% synthetic long-sleeved T-shirts. I didn't really have any trouble with the silk+polyester-or-cotton socks I bought at Next a good while back which I used on the last trip, but some of them are going a bit at the toes so I wanted to get some replacements; if these new ones seem any good I may go back and get a couple more pairs. I've washed one of the new T-shirts tonight (at 30C) to see if it shrinks; this way if it does I can maybe consider taking the unwashed one back for a refund rather than having two ruined ones. It occurred to me I also need to test it to see how easy it is to dry with a towel and hanging overnight - today it had the benefit of a spin rinse in the machine, though as usual I haven't used the tumble dryer - before I take the tags off the second one.
I have been pretty lazy/procrastinaty about making further plans for the trip. It would be good to get some accommodation booked for my arrival in Bogotá (probably near the airport, as I probably said in a previous entry), and to have some rough idea for which city I'm going to go after that first night or two in Bogotá, how I'll get there and (assuming it's by bus) where I need to go to buy the ticket and how convenient it is to get to the bus terminal from my accommodation. I don't intend to plan the trip as a whole out in excruciating detail at this point - though I do also think it would be good to have a rough possible itinerary - but since on arrival I'm treating Bogotá as just a brief layover I do need to decide before I go (and ideally ASAP, so I can book stuff) where my first non-Bogotá stop will be, and I can then consider booking accommodation there and maybe even transport from Bogotá to there (especially if it will be by air).
[time passes] Right, I've forced myself to have a very quick poke at the guide book, with respect to starting to formulate a rough itinerary. I don't have one yet, but I note the (dated) guide book also agrees with the F&CO website that you shouldn't travel by bus or coach overnight. And Cartagena, for example, is apparently a 20 hour bus trip from Bogotá (according to the guide book, but I doubt the travel time has changed much), which would seem therefore to be completely ruled out. However, I've had a quick look at flight prices online and - while I am looking at dates well in advance at this point (I arbitrarily picked 25th January) - there are numerous flights from Bogotá to Cali in the £26-£38 range, which does look decidedly affordable. (Obviously there's a bit more for getting to/from the airport at either end, but if I'm travelling in daylight and given I do more-or-less speak Spanish I may well be able to use public transport to do these airport transfers.) Maybe the lack of security of long-distance bus travel means most locals are going to be flying instead of taking the bus and that means there's more demand and therefore flights aren't such a luxury item as they seem to be in other places I've been in South America (though to be fair, I don't normally pay too much attention; if bus is an option, I tend to go for it on slightly vague principles).
Now it may be that on closer inspection there would be enough points of interest to break down a Bogotá-Cartagena journey into maybe four separate legs of about 5 hours each, but it seems a bit implausible that there would be suitably large towns at that precise a level of spacing, and that is already with four legs. The impression I've formed is that from a safety POV you really don't want to be in overly rural areas unless (maybe) they are noted tourist destinations, so it does look like the plan has to be to use air travel for the longer hops and only use buses for visiting places within (say) 100km of a major city.
I've already skimmed the guide book (Colombia section; remember it's actually a South America guidebook) once, but I should probably go through it again and make some notes on places/things I might want to see or do, then once I have those notes I could use them to formulate a possibly sensible set of flights (I don't want to be zig-zagging like crazy all over the country, as presumably distance correlates with price). I wouldn't book those flights in advance, but it would reduce the chances of me covering more distance than necessary.
[time passes] Happened to check on MSE travel cards page and I noticed there's a new bank Bó (backed by NatWest) which offers a travel-friendly Visa debit card; one of these would have been super handy in Argentina, so I've applied. This involves the same kind of massively intrusive sign up process I had with my NatWest current account; you might have thought the fact I already have a NatWest current account would eliminate the need for this, but hey, why not jerk me around a bit anyway? Still, assuming this goes through that will be useful. It's also an extra card I can take with me with a low "credit limit" (I'd probably just keep a couple of hundred quid in the account, and it's a debit card) which isn't too bad for my personal security.
9th Dec I did a test "hand dry" of the wool/acrylic T-shirt, seemed to be fine - not even that wet after wringing out in a towel, dry the next morning after hanging overnight.
Right, haven't heard back from Nomad Travel despite calling over a week ago so I've called Superdrug and managed to get three appointments for rabies vaccination. At least according to the (non-medically-trained) receptionist I spoke to the three doses seem to have to be given on precisely days 1, 7 and 21-28 so it's lucky this fits in round Christmas and my plan to probably spend a week up in Skegness between Christmas and flying out. First appointment is this Wednesday. I'm a bit nervy this is going to mean I feel somehow physically shit over Christmas, but it can't be helped - I am *not* looking this up, just have to go through with it regardless, and I would guess it's probably just going to be a question of soreness for a few days after each injection. I really should have got this done months ago given it lasts ten years, but I guess this way I might get a bit more "use" out of the ten year duration instead of wasting six months of it in the UK, and it is what it is at this point. This will cost 3x£58; the first appointment is 30 mins as it involves a nurse consultation, the others 15 minutes, but the consultation is "free".
11th Dec Got the first rabies vaccination done a few hours ago. Doesn't hurt yet. I asked the nurse (pharmacist?) injecting me what the side-effects would be and I think this is just like any other vaccination, it's not like because it's rabies it's really painful. Probably a stupid thought on my part in the first place but anyway.
Not *super* happy that he seemed to be very keen to upsell me on three or four other vaccinations I had never heard of, despite looking on the NHS-recommended website beforehand. I was (I hope) polite but firm, brought a sheet of paper with his recommendations on and said I'd look into them but I didn't let him railroad me in to getting them all done today. Also a bit miffed that I apparently didn't have the two follow-up appointments made despite us discussing them when I called to book this first appointment; luckily I called them when I left the shop and managed to get appointments OK, but given the apparently quite precise vaccination schedule needed this could have turned into a bit of a mare if I couldn't get the follow-up appointments after all.
I will look into those other vaccinations later but gut feeling is I'm not having any of them. At least one of them has a pretty tight vaccination schedule which might not fit with the fact I'm going to be away for slightly over two weeks over Christmas.
Oh, and despite me showing him my vaccination booklet as he requested, he "didn't notice" I'd already had diptheria, tetanus & polio only last year and that was up to date and included this in the swathe of recommended vaccines - luckily I did notice and query this and he apologised and acknowledged the mistake. This probably was a genuine slip, but really I did not like the attempt at upselling and it gave me a bad feeling. Actually I think the fact that he recommended this vaccination and I'm thinking "hang on, didn't I already have that?" made me particularly unreceptive to his other suggestions.
13th Dec FWIW, my left arm was the tiniest bit sore when I went to bed on the night (early morning of next day, really) of 11th, and I haven't really had any trouble with it; it's maybe the tiniest bit sore now, but it's never really been a significant concern and I've mostly just forgotten I've been vaccinated (albeit only part 1 of 3). Maybe the guy who injected me was very good at what he does or it's just lucky.
14th Dec Forcing myself to think about further trip preparations, I wonder if I should go and buy loads more of the socks I got from Decathlon the other weekend. I normally take five pairs of socks with me, if all five pairs were identical it would help if any get lost in laundry accidents - obviously if I lose one that's always crap, but if I lose two and they're all identical I still have four matching pairs. Those socks are also black but have a sort of pattern on the foot which might make them a little bit more distinctive - I can say to laundry staff "they looked like these" and show them one of the other pairs, and they're not just "black socks" or "black socks with a very subtle coloured stripe" like the ones I took last time.
It sounds like it should be trivial, but I've had problems in the past managing my dirty clothes. I tend to stuff them into a solid carrier bag, but it's not possible to fasten the top and it often comes open. I think I have tried to use two carrier bags, one for underwear and one for other things, so that the presumably-dirtier underwear doesn't contaminate the other clothes (particularly important if some kind of mini-emergency means I'm forced to re-wear an item of outer clothing without washing it first), but I'm not sure. I've been intermittently poking on the web to try to find a better solution, I think I might see if I can get a couple of "dry bags" or similar - one large enough for the bulkier clothes, one small one for dirty underwear. This should also have the beneficial effect of isolating the dirty underwear.
Experimenting with a random plastic container just to estimate volume, four tops (without any significant squeezing) take about six litres. Four sets of underwear is about 1.75 litres with mild by-hand squeezing; yes, I also experimented with an 1800ml ice cream tub and that just about holds the underwear.
It occurs to me that although I really don't want to have to resort to this, these dry bags could be attached on the outside of my new relatively small backpack to expand capacity if I really come unstuck. If nothing else, I could maybe do this when I'm staying in one place - if they're attached to the backpack I won't lose them or leave them behind by mistake - to avoid continually packing and unpacking the backpack to get stuff in and out, and only go to the trouble of packing everything neatly-ish inside it when I'm going to move to a new place. I hope this won't be necessary, but since the new backpack and its reduced capacity and less convenient form factor are an experiment it would be good to have options.
15th Dec Just realised by accident that I actually have an electronic Colombia guide book purchased in 2014. Lonely Planet Colombia, 6th edition, published 2012. Checking their website, the latest is 8th edition, published 2018; the electronic version costs £8.44 or £2 per chapter. Not sure if I'll splurge on that or not. Quick poke on web fails to turn up a discount code that works. Rough Guide to Colombia seemst to be £11.99.
The thing is that as I've waffled about before, I don't find a lot of the details in the guide book that helpful. The acommodation is usually not on the booking sites I check, even a guide published in 2018 is going to be over a year out of date with regard to things like safety, I find the tone of the guidebooks ("obviously you're a 20 year old eco-fanatic who makes friends easily, loves to party and worships indigenous cultures while reviling capitalism") offputting. What's useful is having a broad overview of the country, interesting sites, hints on bus routes and journey times and so forth, and I'm not sure that changes as rapidly or is worth paying for an up-to-date copy of the guidebook. In terms of safety I'm probably going to get better advice from sites like the F&CO and maybe the web, and as for accommodation in reality I'm almost always going to be going for something which is one on of the handful of big booking websites and trust the reviews on there.
Still, I'm glad I found this electronic guidebook - if I'd thought the only guidebook I had was the 2010 vintage paperback, I might well have bought an electronic copy. As it is I'll mull over this.
17th Dec Two completely unrelated and not novel thoughts but both have recently occurred to me again so let me jot them down here:
1) The trip should give my fingers and especially my right little finger/wrist a break from typing/mouse strain. Since I don't take a laptop with me, all my geeking out will be done on my smartphone, and even though it has a keyboard it's completely different to type on.
2) It doesn't feel entirely good, but it is the case, that I *really* don't like thinking about the trip in some sense. I am not flicking through the guide book with a sense of joy, jotting down places I "simply must visit" or engaging in plesant daydreams of time spent doing activity X or Y. If memory serves it's often like this *during* the trip too; deciding where to go next and sorting out travel and accommodation feels like a terrible chore. The "pain" of knowing I have to do this sometimes takes the shine off other day-to-day activities. I don't know if this is a problem or not, maybe it's just how I am, maybe I should confront this, I really don't know, but anyway, just noting the thought down.
On point 2, there might be an argument for forcing myself to ensure I do have a "default" itinerary in mind before I leave home. I wouldn't be *forced* to stick to it if something interesting came up, but in the absence of any specific desires to go to place X or not go to place Y based on new information, it would reduce the amount of on-the-fly decision making needed and take that pain away from the trip itself.
[later] I forced myself to skim through the guide book and I've scribbled down a few places I'd sort of like to visit if I can, though hardly any of them are "must dos"; if I find myself in place X and I like it and want to stay there for two months, that's fine. I haven't tried to stitch these together into a vaguely geographically coherent itinerary yet.
Bit edgy re security; I haven't looked into accommodation or anything at all yet, but I was wondering if I could get an Uber from the airport and apparently (trying to filter away the self-righteousness of some forum commenters) they are not exactly legal in Colombia, and although they're widely used the police and/or taxi drivers make it imprudent to use them to/from the airport. Of course - and I am bearing in mind this is fuckwits on an internet forum - what I read also makes it sound like taking a regular taxi is not completely safe, and I am now fearing I'm going to get mugged while standing on the street waiting for a pre-arrange taxi or Uber to pick me up. But I'm sure this is just the regular jitters, and as for the actual practicalities of arranging taxis (which I fear I may have to rely on more than I normally do, depending on whether it's actually safe to walk around in the evening where I am) I can look into that properly later on. All this paranoia was prompted merely by random incidental (dis)information while trying to see if Uber were an option.
Uber's own website (at least the page which came up from my web search) gives no information to the effect that they're not legal in Colombia. Maybe they in fact are. The impression I got from the forum was that they may not be legal but not actually illegal either. Frankly I don't have a fucking clue. I suppose what's really important to me here and now is that I shouldn't plan on using them to/from the airport in Bogotá.
[bit later] Right, I've made a heroic effort and spent a few minutes scribbling on a swiped-from-Google-image-search printed map of the country using my notes from earlier. This is nowhere near a plan yet, but I'm kind of thinking (here, pre-book means "ideally in the next few days, certainly before I leave the UK"):
- Fly into Bogotá, obviously (I've already booked this).
- Pre-book a couple of nights in somewhere with a private room near-ish to the airport if possible (to minimise transport hassles). Hostel is fine, maybe even good, but I want a private room post-flight. This will let me get over the flights - that sounds a bit stupid, I mean, you just sit on your arse for 15 hours, really, but still, flights always take it out of me - and maybe start to find my feet with the country before I do anything else.
- Pre-book a flight out of Bogotá to Cartagena. Given my willingness to stay "indefinitely" in a single place if I find it congenial (and I obviously kind of hope I *do* find somewhere suitably congenial), I think it makes sense to go to Cartagena first as it's the closest I come to having somewhere I "must" go.
- Pre-book at least a couple of nights and perhaps getting on for a week's accomodation in Cartagena. At least the first couple of nights should be in a private room, and given I don't want to be changing accommodation before I get settled in I probably will be booking for nearer a week and will therefore be booking a private room for a week.
- Make sure I've done as much research as I can on transport to/from the airport in Bogotá and Cartagena before I go; if my accommodation offers cheap-ish and stress-free transfers, take that. As always, I think it's (rationally) more stressful and feels more vulnerable to be in transit with my bag and all my worldly possessions and all my forms of access to money than it does walking the street with my bag relatively safe back at my accommodation, so I need to minimise the stress and risk of an incident early in the trip while in transit.
- Spend a few days being casually touristy in Cartagena. See how I get on. Look for Spanish schools and/or language exchange evenings. Try to get a feel for how to get around safely within the city, especially after dark.
- I will probably want to extend my stay past the initial pre-booked accommodation, but once I've seen what it's like and got a feel for the geography I can consider other options, be they airbnb flats, airbnb homestays, hostels, whatever. I could imagine extending my stay a week at a time, perhaps changing accommodation every week depending on how I feel and what I'm doing.
- Consider using Cartagena as a base for trips of several days (weeks, even, if I want to) to nearby places by bus, e.g. Barranquilla or Santa Marta. I'll use planes if it seems best, but a few hours by bus to somewhere nearby is probably OK, and some mid-size places probably won't have airports of their own anyway. I don't want to be going anywhere extremely rural without serious safety advice, of course.
- When I feel sated with Cartagena and the surrounding region, fly down to Cali.
- Repeat the "settle in for a few days, make sure I have nice private accommodation for the first few days at least, make sure I've got the transfer from the airport to my acommodation as sorted as I can in advance, extend accommodation until I'm fed up, use the city as a base for side-trips to other places of interest in the region" routine from Cali.
- Fly to Medellin, repeat the routine. It's a bit silly but I think the main reason I'm tempted to includ Medellin is that I'd like to visit El Peñol nearby, simply because it sounds kind of cool from reading about it in the guidebook - but it's not AFAICT the kind of "yes, I simply must see it" attraction you'd normally be talking about on a high level itinerary like this.
- Fly to Bogotá, repeat the routine - except I've already spent a week in Bogotá, so I'd probably be inclined to move straight on to side-trips (e.g. to Tunja, which is apparently about three hours away by bus). This leaves me in/near Bogotá ready for the flight home; if I have lots of time free because I never really settled in any of the other places, I can obviously insert some other cities/regions between Medellin and Bogota.
I could imagine swapping Medellin and Cali in that itinerary. My quick-glance-at-the-guide-book impression is that Cartagena and Cali are both pretty warm, whereas Medellin is described as "city of eternal spring" and may be more comfortable. So on the one hand, maybe it would be a nice break between Cartagena and Cali in that sense, but on the other hand maybe if I've acclimatised in Cartagena it would make Cali more comfortable to go there without losing any acclimatisation in Medellin first. (And on this note, I have to expect that the first week or two in Cartagena I'm going to be feeling "fuck, it's too hot" until I do get acclimatised. And maybe springing for somewhere which has aircon - and using it sparingly so I *do* acclimatise - would be a good idea.)
I don't expect this plan to survive contact with the flight/accommodation booking web sites ("it costs *how much* to fly to Cartagena in high season? And even a dorm bed costs *that* much? Fuck that!"), but at least it's a starting point. As I've probably already said (wankily smug way of putting it as it unfortunately is) I'd rather go "deep than broad" given the chance, and I don't have to "do" all the tourist high spots in this trip. Hell, I don't actually have to do any of them, but barring some really unfortunate experience putting me off the country altogether, I can and probably will return to the country again in the future and can visit some other areas then.
With regard to the side trips, I don't mean that I'd necessary be retaining any accommodation or leaving any of my belongings in the city because I'd only be gone overnight. I just mean that the impression I get is that long-distance travel by bus is not really smart or necessary, but around each city is a region where it's both safe and necessary to travel by bus for a few hours to get to smaller but probably perfectly safe (perhaps even safer?) towns, so I have to fly into and out of these cities at each separate stage of the trip, but once I'm in that region I can travel "locally" by bus.
I'm going to resist the urge to ride this wave of energy and start looking at accommodation or flights yet, because I do want to mull over this very sketchy plan first. Let me compromise with myself and just do a very quick look for accommodation near-ish to Bogotá airport. OK, there are a couple of hostels with private rooms (shared bathroom, but that's OK) near the airport in the £12-15/night price range, at least one of them says "shuttle bus" under facilities, I haven't bothered to see if that's airport pick up or only a bus *to* the airport or checked prices, but this seems manageable. I wouldn't be planning on going into Bogotá city centre during this initial stay, I'd be quite happy to just wander round the neighbourhood, shove my head in the church for a look round, practice ordering in some cheap restaurant, etc, for a day or two before catching the onward flight. hostelworld.com has at least one of those places at "only 2 rooms available, selling out fast"; I've been pressured by this kind of shit before, I don't want to dither unnecessarily but I'm not being pushed right now. Give it a day or two to sleep on it and then take a look at actually booking something.
Gut feeling is to avoid airbnb for this initial stage of the trip; I *should* have mobile data on my Three SIM over there, but I could easily see this not working. My experiences of airbnb suggest that you really need WhatsApp access from the street for it not to be a complete nightmare, and if it goes tits up you maybe need to be able to make good old fashioned phone calls too. That's fine if, for example, I've been in Cartagena 4-5 days and have decided I want to stay another week and am just moving within the city to airbnb accommodation; it's not so fine if I've just got off a flight and I'm stressed and feeling vulnerable. I want a "proper" ho(s)tel with staff on site who can open the door and let me in whenever I turn up. If my Three SIM doesn't work properly when I arrive I can look into buying a local SIM, but I don't want to be faffing with that kind of thing before I can check into my initial accommodation.
18th Dec Looks like Lonely Planet have a sale on and are offering all their ebooks for £4.99. This is a bit tempting. It's hardly a huge sum and it would mean I have a guide book with relatively up to date information (sometimes important if I find myself in accommodation with no working wifi), on the other hand given I do have my existing ebook version published in 2012 I'm a bit reluctant to buy it again. I don't think the sale ends that soon and I'll sleep on it.
I mean, if it were 1990, or even 2006 in the relatively early dawn of travel information and booking accommodation online being a thing, I'd absolutely want an up-to-date guidebook, because it would be one of my primary sources of information. But as I already waffled about, nowadays it's useful for an overview and one possible source of information to be weighed up with other sources, but it's just not that critical. If I "enjoyed" reading the guide book more, if it didn't seem so smugly at odds with my own personal circumstances and beliefs, maybe I'd be really chuffed to have the latest edition and browse it excitedly for cool things to see and do, but I don't. However, as I say, £4.99 really isn't a lot of money and it's probably worth it. If nothing else I'm less likely to try to mentally adjust information about safety in the guidebook and get it wrong in one direction or another. Still going to sleep on it though.
19th Dec I had actually been mildly worried by a mention in the outdated guide book suggesting the immigration official on arrival may have a tendency to write <90 days on your passport stamp; since I have flights booked to give me an exact 90 day trip and I don't plan to cross any borders during that time, this could be a bit of a mess. However, a quick poke on the web seems to suggest that I will most likely be given 90 days, and it also appears possible to pay for an extension (at an annoying-but-tolerable cost of USD30) online. Maybe this is an example of the kind of stress - if not actual problem - caused by having an outdated guide book.
21st Dec 2300ish Right, a quick poke on expedia (not tried any comparison sites) shows flights from Bogotá to Cartagena on Sunday 26th January for £45 one way including taxes; this may not include checked baggage but I don't need that, and it may not include reserved seats but I can probably take a punt on a randomly allocated shitty seat for a 1h 25m flight. This is with LATAM and there are loads of flights, including one 1233-1358 which looks pretty decent, that would allow me to make both airport transits in broad daylight and even if I got to the airport a couple of hours before the flight it doesn't require getting up insanely early. Sunday 26th is a little arbitrary, but that gives me three nights and two full days in Bogotá to recover from the long flights and start to find my feet. I could fly the day before for the same price. Not booking this now, but this shows that there are acceptable flights if I don't dither too much.
What about accomodation in Cartagena? As per my sketchy plan from a few days ago, let's just look for a private room for a week from Sunday 26th - at the moment I don't plan to book any of this, I am just checking that the plan seems feasible to implement then I'll sleep on it and maybe book in a day or so. OK, hostelworld has a decent-ish sounding (but only 2 rooms left!) place with private room-shared bathroom at £21/night; this is towards the low end, but there are a few options under £30/night and I think this is doable. I'd hope to be able to economise with a bit of intermittent dormitory accommodation and/or prices going down as high season passes, but that's acceptable.
And again just looking on hostelworld as this is a sanity check, what about Bogotá check in 23 Jan check out 26 Jan? Picking stuff near the airport. Yeah, there's at least one decent sounding place at £13/night (shared bathroom), not super clear if they will arrange pickup from the airport but it's very close anyway, and they will arrange (no price mentioned on first glance) transfer to the airport.
A possibly outdated (but no obvious reason to assume this) website says there is an official taxi service at Bogotá airport which you pay for before you exit the gates (thereby presumably avoiding any touts while I'm feeling tired and vulnerable) and that it costs about €16 for a ride to the city centre, taking 35 minutes; I'd therefore hope that it's not going to be ridiculously pricey to a hostel five minutes away. I *haven't* made any attempt at this point to search out more explicitly up to date information; one way or another I *have* to make this transit, and it's not the sort of thing which is going to cause me to cancel the entire trip. :-) This is one area where an up-to-date guidebook might be useful, and/or I could also make an effort to search on e.g. forums for recent advice too - right now I'm just sanity checking my basic plan, as I keep saying.
So this all looks broadly doable. Cartagena looks a bit pricier than I'd like, but it is the middle of high season when I'm going and it is tolerably priced anyway. I think I'm going to sleep on this and I may well go and book some stuff tomorrow, checking multiple sites for accommodation to get the best deal I can. hostelworld seems to advertise free cancellation if you book more than 7 days in advance, but then most of the places I look at have two different prices for the same room, one with free cancellation and another lower price without free cancellation, which seems to me to rather undermine the meaning of the word "free", but maybe I've overlooked something; this has all just been a hasty sanity check/priming my mind with the idea to see if I wake up with the screaming heebie-jeebies over the idea before I go and actually book.
23rd Dec 0050 OK, I've just paid £29 through kayak.co.uk for a flight from Bogotá to Cartagena on 26th January. This is no checked baggage, but I don't think I need it - the allowance is 8kg and the dimensions accommodate my Voyageur bag so should definitely acommodate the new bag which fits inside it. 8kg is probably fine and I can always e.g. wear my fleece on the plane (I probably will anyway). No idea about reserved seating but I am thinking I will take a chance on this for such a short flight. The flight is actually "handled" by kiwi.com and I have seen some not-exactly-iffy but semi-positive semi-worrying stuff about them on the web, but while a fuck-up here would be annoying this is *not* an international flight and it seems worth giving this cheap option a try.
OOOOK, first sign of fuckery. This is a LATAM flight, I had checked their baggage allowance on their own site, but the e-mail from kayak.co.uk says "1xpersonal item 4kg". This may well not be binding, I mean, LATAM presumably are the ones enforcing the rules and I won't have AFAIK a special "kiwi.com" ticket, this may just be kiwi showing lowest-common-denominator-for-all-the-airlines-they-do-with-their-weird-model. This is the *only* flight I will be booking before I'm in Colombia and in Cartagena and deciding when/where to go next, so let's see how this goes, if it goes well I will have confidence in them and can probably save big on my subsequent flights within the country, if I get stiffed I will know to avoid them like the plague.
I'm tempted to put off booking accommodation, but there were *other* flights on expedia (at least yesterday) at tolerable prices and I do pretty much want to fly that day so let's have a poke and see what we can do, then it will be sorted and I can forget about it.
booking.com has some homestays (private room) for £26 for three nights in Bogotá near airport, but this is probably quite airbnb-ish (I see mention of WhatsApp in some comments) and I don't need that kind of exposure to mobile roaming risk when I'm fresh off an international flight and it's getting dark.
0112 You fucking idiot Steve. Just gone and booked a hostel - splurging on a private ensuite room - near the airport for the first three nights. Not a problem as such, *except* I paid on a non-travel credit card and it *seems* to be saying that although the deposit has been charged in UK pounds, the property will be taking the rest of the payment themselves on the same card in Colombia pesos, which means I'm going to get stiffed with a fee from the credit card provider.
And yay, kiwi.com have e-mailed to say I have to call them within 12 hours to verify I am the payment card owner. FFS. Absolute cunts. This is particularly inconvenient give this means - although I'll almost certainly be up - I have to call them Monday *morning*, not Monday afternoon. On the other hand, I do note the e-mail says that if they don't hear from me, my booking will be declined *and I will be refunded*. So I suppose this does give me a kind of free cancellation option if after sleeping on it I feel bad about this.
I have drafted an e-mail (in Spanish; maybe it will make them feel better disposed to me) to the hostel asking if I can pay in cash on arrival or with a different card. TBH I half expect they *won't* charge my card unless I cancel anyway, in my experience if memory serves I nearly always end up paying everything except the initial deposit when I check in for hostelworld booking, but who knows? I haven't sent the e-mail yet; I am thinking the worst case (although a quick poke on the card's website seems they are being enragingly coy about just *saying what the fucking fee actually is*) is a 2.99% fee, which on this £40 transaction is galling but not the end of the world, and it may simply be easiest to avoid getting into a debate with the hostel. I suspect my e-mail is perfectly comprehensible but even if we assume my Spanish is flawless, what if they ask me to start e-mailing them the alternate credit card number? The last thing I need is to take any chances on any iffy transactions fucking up one of my travel credit cards. Yeah, fuck it, I'll sleep on this too but just have to eat that fee *if* it happens.
Anyway, the room is about £14.22 (from memory) a night, which isn't too bad. They do appear to offer an airport pickup service if you book in advance, though it costs more than a regular taxi. I'm not rushing to book that now, I've got enough shit to deal with already and it's not like I'm flying tomorrow.
0134 Need to chill a bit. While I've made at least one schoolboy mistake - using a non-travel card, because the website deluded me into thinking it was all in pounds - this *may* in practice not matter (I still think it's likely they'll want cash on arrival) and if they do charge that card in Colombian pesos I'll be out a bit over a quid, which isn't the end of the world.
I didn't spring extra for "free" cancellation (I suppose it is the cancellation which is free, not the fact that you *get* free cancellation for free), it would have "only" been an extra 70p-ish a night, but since I've already booked my very expensive international flight into Bogota on that day and I really don't expect my basic "camp out by the airport to recover and settle into the country for a few days" plan to change, I just didn't see the point in being psychologically engineering into paying for flexibility.
It's fucking annoying that I've got to call kiwi in the morning but it's not the end of the world and as I say this is perhaps a blessing in disguise as it gives me a free cancellation option. To be fair, and given that I will be wanting to book a few flights during my time in Colombia and that I do travel a modest amount, while this "4kg personal item" thing worries me a little, it does seem smart to give them a try as they could be a pretty good option to have and it's probably worth taking a bit of a chance on this initial flight.
Am I going to book the Cartagena accommodation? Given it *is* peak season there and there are other flight options if I end up getting the kiwi booking voluntarily or involuntarily cancelled, I will have a look now. Then I can maybe feel I've got this sorted and mostly forget about it until I actually get to Colombia.
0150 OK, I've had a brief poke on hostelworld and expedia for accommodation in Cartagena. expedia is capable of sorting by price, but you can't filter out dormitories so it's impossible to find a cheap private room. hostelworld has a bizarre idea of sorting by price, it certainly isn't sorting by the price of the private rooms - yes, looks like it sorts by dorm price, even if you filter the dorms out. FFS. Anyway, this doesn't feel good - Cartagena is a big place, I need to read up on where I should stay geographically, some of the reviews (as always) are mixed ("I woke up in the middle of the night to find myself being bitten by red ants" - but I'll still give a 6.0 "good" rating!?) and this is a more "critical" decision than merely where to stay when I first get into the country, since in Bogotá the plan hinges on staying near the airport so there's no decision to make on location. I'm feeling surprisingly frazzled by all this activity tonight, I'm going to sleep on it, will probably call kiwi to try to convince them to go ahead with my flight booking in the morning and then maybe "tomorrow" night or if not shortly after Christmas I can read up a bit about Cartagena and where to stay and book some accommodation in a more chilled frame of mind. (And a fair few of the places on hostelworld have no or very few reviews, which doesn't inspire confidence. But the real issue is that right now I'm feeling stressed out and I haven't done my homework on the geography of Cartagena and it would be foolish to book without doing that first.)
0208 OK, I'm still feeling pretty fucking stressed. I've done a bit more poking around on the web and finding deeply mixed info regarding kiwi. However, I have pretended to go book the same flight directly on their own web site and it *does* say (pretty early on) that there is a 4kg personal item allowance (and the dimensions are quite small). I have no idea if this *is* the case and the airline is going to enforce kiwi's crappy allowance because I'm on a special ticket, but I'm disinclined to take the chance. The fact that this wasn't made apparent to me before I booked is I think the fault of kayak's integration with kiwi.com - that doesn't make it suck any less, but I can't strictly blame kiwi for that. There's no option to pay extra for a "generous" 8kg standard cabin baggage allowance, I'd have to pay £11 (which in itself is still *relatively* cheap) to check a bag, but I don't *want* to check a bag and risk losing it etc if I can help it.
It doesn't look like I would have any cancellation rights on kiwi normally - I suspect I could maybe argue the toss about not being warned up front of the 4kg personal item limit - but since this payment verification thing effectively gives me a get-out-of-jail-free card, I'm probably going to take it and just not call them. They have sent me an e-mail saying I will be refunded if I don't call, so I'd assume I'm on fairly solid ground to argue the toss if I don't get refunded, and ultimately while it would suck £29 isn't the end of the world. There are no threats or mentions of fees or charges for "cancelling" if I don't call them in the e-mail either.
Once this has cancelled successfully I will book a flight "tomorrow" via a standard travel website.
If they suddenly e-mail me to say I am *not* going to be refunded, I may end up taking a punt on the flight being usable and see how it goes. But given *they* say I will be refunded, I don't expect to end up exploring that branch of the tree of possible outcomes here.
I think if they weren't doing this weird non-standard cabin baggage allowance I'd be feeling relatively comfortable with them and while annoying calling to do the payment verification wouldn't be a massive red flag. But the cabin baggage thing seems deeply sketchy and unpleasant.
Anyway, I'll sleep on it and see what happens. Tempted to waffle more but I'm just going to repeat myself endlessly.
I will just say the payment verification thing is *odd* (if fortunate, as it turns out). Normally when I pay for something online it either goes through or it doesn't, there and then. But whatever.
0234 Of course I can't leave well alone. It's always hard to tell, but no shortage of people complaining about kiwi on the web. Also no shortage of self-righteous twats making ridiculous arguments telling those people it's their own fault; it's not that the complainers always seem to be absolutely in the right, but the self-righteous twats often appear to completely ignore what the complainer is saying when *if true* they would have pretty solid complaints. Very hard to form a definitive opinion on whether the airline or kiwi sets the cabin bag policy, but I might guess there *is* an ultra-scumbag class ticket which kiwi are selling which does have these super-pathetic limits. Certainly lots of people have complaints about being hit with baggage fees on kiwi booked flights, and self-righteous twats aside lots of them seem to be saying they were told one thing when they booked and then found the reality was different when they came to fly. After all, it's not as if this is a multi-leg flight with lots of complex routing which would account for kiwi's ability to sell me a cheaper if perhaps "riskier" ticket than other more traditional travel sites, so there probably has to be *some* kind of catch to getting these flights for £16-ish less than other sites seem to offer. I guess if you really could fly with just a 4kg item you'd be laughing, and it doesn't seem like this ultra-scumbag class ticket I'm inferring exists is sold via most sites.
Anyway, I think I should have avoided allowing myself to pressure myself into booking a flight via them - yes I had started to think about booking this yesterday, *but* that was a £45-ish flight via a site I recognised, the kiwi thing was new to me tonight and I shouldn't have rushed in. But apart from that lesson learned, I think my position is unchanged that a) luckily I apparently have a GOOJF card b) I will sleep on it and then probably use that card and just pay £45 for a no-stress ticket c) kiwi are not *necessarily* dodgy, if not for kayak's crappy integration with them I'd have seen this 4kg limit up front and probably just not booked this particular flight with them, so while all this noise on the web is unsettling I am not absolutely writing them off for future use if it's somehow appropriate.
I think I'm getting a kind of "shit, it's Christmas, need to get this sorted beforehand" feeling which isn't helping. Also, if I *am* going to splurge on the new electronic travel guide, it would make sense to do so *before* I start doing any homework on Cartagena's internal geography, since that's one area where the up-to-date guidebook may well have semi-current and useful information.
Do feel a bit peeved I've gone through all this crap and all I've got out of it is a mildly-satisfactory three day booking for a hostel near Bogotá airport, but there you go. I guess I've forced myself to come to some correct if in hindsight blindingly obvious conclusions like "I need to read up on Cartagena before booking accommodation there" which had managed to elude my procrastinating and/or Christmas-befuddled mind until now.
It's probably clear, but when I say it's important to get the location in Cartagena right, I'm thinking mainly in terms of security. I don't want to accidentally end up in the middle of a slum, or find I've gone and booked myself something where I have to take expensive and perhaps risky taxis even to go out and about during the day. I'm sure I'll get less worried and perhaps even excessively blasé about this kind of thing as I gain experience, but to start with I do want to avoid putting myself at risk as much as possible.
1319 I had e-mails from kiwi earlier, including a confirmation of refund which shows the full amount. I still have lingering "can I trust this?" feelings but it's probably fine, anyway, I just need to wait now and check my credit card statement in a few days. Will probably book a replacement flight tonight.
I am a bit concerned now that I'm going to make a booking via another site and LATAM are going to get upset/confused because I have/have tried to buy two tickets, but just have to hope I guess. (There is some suggestion in the kiwi e-mails that *LATAM* have failed to verify my details, but I have no idea to what extent this is the case or to what extent it might matter.)
1508 Had a quick poke about rebooking the flight. kayak keep showing me prices via kiwi which is unhelpful. There are some budget airlines in there but the headline fares include *no* cabin or checked baggage, and (not that I'm sure if they're good value or not) the intermediate priced fares have checked baggage but not cabin baggage, which is the opposite of what I want. However, opodo have some LATAM flights at a bit under £45 (a pound or two cheaper than the same flights on expedia). I may book one of these, they want extra to choose a seat but I am thinking I might take a punt on not paying for a seat. Yes I don't *like* being stuck in the middle and I'm not super keen on window seat either, but I *have* done it and this is only a short flight and it seems like a good opportunity to stretch my comfort zone slightly. I'd sort of like to book now to get this sorted, but I'll let it slide until this evening.
1535 OK, I had a quick poke at my old electronic guidebook to get the basic geography down. A bit of a poke on the web and I've booked a private room for £71 for 7 nights (!) via booking.com; free cancellation until 11th January. The reviews are broadly positive (the usual weirdness, people saying there were cockroaches in the bathroom then rating it 7/10 - obviously I don't want cockroaches, but in places with that kind of climate you expect the odd one every now and then and *maybe* some people overreact a bit, I just don't know) and it felt like a decent-ish option, I can't resist a bargain, I really don't want anything "fancy", as long as it's basically clean and safe and this should meet the requirements there, it is pretty central so should be good for getting around without taxis as much as possible.
OK, I've had a confirmation e-mail, I thought I'd been stiffed for a hidden 19% VAT but that's only for Colombian citizens so it should be fine.
So I still need to book a flight but I will do that later. I *may* exercise my free cancellation right on this property, but I probably won't. I do like to keep costs down and as I say I'm quite happy with basic accommodation; this is a private room with a private bathroom so happy days really.
I may contact one or both of the places I've booked to pre-arrange airport transfers but I don't need to rush into doing that - I'd assume I can easily do that a week or two before I fly - and obviously for the one in Cartagena I don't actually know when I'll be getting to the airport yet as I haven't booked the flight. I may well make my own way from the airport in one or both cases, I would need to read up on this, but as I say this just doesn't have the urgency of booking accommodation where things might sell out and/or prices might go up.
1557 Must say I feel surprisingly relieved for having booked that accommodation in Cartagena. Yes, there's still the flight, but it feels like things are coming together. And I'm also happy to see the price is pretty decent, that gives me hope the trip as a whole won't turn out to be insanely expensive. Obviously I will splash out as and when there's something I really want to do which is expensive, but good to keep costs down where I can.
28th Dec 0852 I couldn't sleep properly. [20th Jan addition: not, if memory serves, for worrying about this as such. I just couldn't sleep properly for some reason so ended up getting up unusually early for me.] In any case, the kiwi flight refund seemed to go back onto my credit card the other day and I've just booked another flight Bogota-Cartagena on 26th January; this was a hair over £45 but that's OK, I had been getting antsy about prices going up during my semi-enforced inactivity over Christmas. This is a LATAM flight, I have 8kg of hand baggage allowance but not checked baggage, which should be fine. I decided not to splurge on choosing a seat, I hope I don't regret this but it's an hour and a half flight and I want to stretch my comfort zone a bit here (back to somewhere it used to encompass). Had minor row with parents due to wanting assistance with a pseudo-Scalextrix toy the grandchildren were playing with while trying to book, yay. (Heaven forbid they should have to wait, or put a few seconds of concentration into understanding how it works or why.)
Probably related in an indeterminate causal way with the not sleeping, I am starting to be a bit worried about the trip, imagining myself feeling nervous and/or lonely, but I'm sure this is mostly irrational. At least I have now got all the key elements booked, I still need to look into the airport transfer options and confirm various flights and bookings nearer the time, but this is all the main booking needed until I've arrived in Cartagena and decide how much longer I want to stay there.
I do have a lingering "did I rush into booking this *specific* flight?" concern - am I suddenly going to realise I booked for January 2021 in my haste, or similar - but it does feel sort of good to have this done.
I booked this via expedia, I did have a quick look on opodo first (I didn't bother with kayak) but for whatever reason they were way more expensive on these LATAM flights (£60+). They did have some Viva flights at pretty decent prices (£30? can't remember any more) but I looked and Viva give you a 6kg hand baggage allowance which isn't enough (and I also wasn't super impressed that opodo said "hand baggage included" but did not say how much no matter where you clicked; I had to go poking on the Viva air site) and even if I wanted to check a bag that would cost extra. It is actually just possible my bag would be under 6kg but I don't want to gamble on that at this point; once I'm actually on the trip with a definite set of bag contents and have flown a couple of times and seen how much it weighs I might be able to take a cheaper flight with someone like Viva for another leg of the trip.
1st Jan 1354 Have finally got the post redirection set up for the trip. On the one hand, I always want to start the redirection early to reduce the chances of post slipping through the cracks (e.g. it's posted before the redirection starts but not delivered until afterwards) and it ending up sitting in my easy-to-steal-from mailbox for months. On the other, I ideally want to be able to receive last-minute orders of stuff for the trip without that getting redirected. There's also an element of needing to time the receipt of the "we are redirecting your post for n months" letter so that it can't be stolen from my mailbox while I'm away right now visiting family for Christmas, as the last thing I want is to clue the personal stealing my post in to the fact that the flat will be empty for months. Anyway, I finally mentally balanced all these factors and actually got the redirection set up, so that's another minor chore sorted.
1409 Was thinking I'd probably splurge £4.99 on the Lonely Planet electronic guide book offer, but it seems to have finished. Some sites suggest it runs until mid January but it doesn't seem to be working, so they may have pulled it - there's some crappy "buy 2 get 1 free" offer instead. Gut feeling is if nothing better turns up I will content myself with my old electronic copy; I was willing to pay £4.99 for a new one but I'm not paying £12.59. In hindsight of course I should have bought this earlier, but then again I wasn't and aren't completely desperate. Quick poke on amazon suggests there's no other publisher selling anything cheap; there's a tiny 144 page Insight guide on paper which comes with a free ebook for £5.24, but that doesn't sound great.
4th Jan 1657 My intermittent attempts to purchase a cheap-but-decent smartphone on ebay over the last few months have failed. I now need to ramp up my efforts a bit, I've got a bid in for something at the moment and there are a couple of semi-commercial sellers selling the same phone for £55-60-ish buy it now at the moment, I may end up having to go with one of those. I had hoped/expected (based on previous sales) to get one second hand for £40-ish but as always seems to happen with ebay once I start to actually bid they never seem to sell quite as cheaply, and perhaps I never quite got far enough towards saying "fuck it, I'd better bid an extra five quid on this because otherwise I'll end up paying even more to buy something last minute". I had really been hoping to find something *extremely* battered (but with an intact screen) for even less - my requirements are a bit unusual, because this is a spare phone for emergencies and to carry around when I think I might get mugged, so I want it to *actually* be cheap and I want it to *look* cheap - but this hasn't come off.
Since I finished booking the flights and accommodation there's been little activity re trip preparation; I am going back to London tomorrow and once I get settled back in there I will probably start a mini flurry of preparations. I have ordered myself a two litre dry bag (I got a five litre one over Christmas) but it hasn't turned up yet; I am hoping these together will handle my laundry better than on previous trips when I used carrier bags. I don't need to do anything terribly difficult, but I need to research and possibly pre-book airport-accommodation transport and perhaps confirm some of my bookings and make sure I have the accommodation details printed on paper and marked on Google Maps etc etc.
I do have a broad background nervousness about the trip, it feels a little dangerous and/or stressful and/or lonely, but it's not too bad and I am trying to fight against this. I *do* want to do it, it's just that right now it feels a bit of a strain. I mean, the trip is *supposed* to be fun as well as vaguely challenging and so forth. And it probably will be; I think I need to make an effort not to overload myself with places I must go and things I must do and so forth. As long as I'm not spending all day every day in my accommodation that's fine. It would probably be a good idea - though it's really *not* in my nature - if I were able to at least at times to get into a cycle of getting up *relatively* early (9-10am) and going to bed a bit earlier, as I could then do wandering round casual tourism (sightseeing, coffee drinking, lunch eating) without always feeling a bit constrained and rushed by getting up at midday and leaving my accommodation around 1-2pm. But I just need to see how it goes, not beat myself up and take things as they come
2352 And while it's trite, it's also probably somewhat true that (even ignoring the fact the trip will probably be fun, despite almost inevitably having some of those wake-up-at-6am-feeling-lost-and-alone-for-a-couple-of-minutes incidents and similar) I will appreciate being at home (in all of its possible senses) much more for having been away for three months.
5th Jan 1841 I didn't win the auction I had left a bid on. I've just gone and bought a HTC One A9s 32GB for £55 secondhand buy it now. This is a bit more than I wanted to pay, but it's not terrible, and although I really would have preferred "cheap" to "good" for this phone, at least with it being the 32GB model (which I think has 3GB RAM instead of 2GB on the 16GB model; 16GB of *storage* would be fine for my use case, especially since it has a micro SD slot, but the extra 1GB of "real" RAM is probably a good thing) it should be a bit more usable and retain that usability for a bit longer. I had been really looking for a HTC One A9 actually, but this seemed a reasonably good (if not amazing) price and although it's hard to be sure, if gsmarena's specs are to be believed the A9s may have one single model for all territories and thus cover more 4G bands than the (presumably) EMEA A9 I would have been buying - this may be mildly helpful given I'm going to South America, although in reality what's *most* important is that I have a second phone which will work on wifi and which will be pre-authenticated for some of my critical accounts in the event the other phone is lost, stolen or broken.
On a more mundane note, I did pick up a "solid" stick deodorant the other day; I've been led to believe that these don't count as liquids (which is only rational, but this is a Security Concern and therefore that's perhaps not relevant) and therefore don't need to be squashed into the plastic bag when going through airport security. I don't plan to rely on this by packing the plastic bag extra full of other liquids, but it may be a tiny convenience boost.
7th Jan 1631 Got third rabies shot done. No problem, although the nurse told me that it lasts for five years (I didn't mention I'd thought it was ten), *and* (as I write this, the word "and" seems dubious) I need a booster shot before I go away after a year, but if I have a booster shot every year that will keep me going for life and I never need to get this three shot course again. TBH this is chronically unclear, but I don't need to clear it up now. I will probably be going away again in a year's time and at that point I can investigate whether I need a booster or not. I have no idea what's supposed to happen if I don't go away for (say) three years, which is within the five years mentioned, but get my first booster at that three year point. [20th Jan - I might hope you can have a booster any time within the first five years, otherwise in what possible sense does the vaccinations I've just had "last five years"?]
TBH given how I was already a bit iffy about the value of the rabies vaccination - the nurse did point out that I still needed medical attention if I was bitten, which I already knew - if I've understood these additional factors (it only lasts five years, and I still need a booster if I travel between 1-5 years from now) it seems even less worth the expense and hassle. But it's done now, and there's no harm except for the financial cost, and without committing the sunk cost fallacy *if* my understanding is correct, next time I travel the choice will be "one shot at approximately £58 for protection or don't bother", not "three shots at £58". If I don't travel, or don't travel to an area with rabies a notable threat, next year, I may want to try to find out whether I can avoid having the booster simply because a year has passed and can instead have it at any point within the first five years. Feh.
(Just for the record - I'm not unhappy or specifically confused about this - the nurse didn't write down a "next booster due" date in my vaccination booklet because he said he didn't know, as it would depend on when I travelled etc.)
1757 I suddenly thought I'd check if my normal UK SIM supports roaming - I'm *sure* it didn't used to, never mind the cost - and it looks like it does. The charges are absolutely insane (£1.50/minute to receive calls, £3.60/minute to make a call, £0.60 to text, £3.60/MB for data) but given the insistence of everyone on sending me text messages to confirm login details all the time and the difficulty/inconvenience of changing every single account to use my "travel SIM" number, I think I will take that SIM abroad with me as well as the travel SIM. I do have a £5 extra charges cap set on my account so I would hope that would prevent me from the worst possible surprises, and obviously I will turn off mobile data when roaming. Since I'm going to have two phones I will be able to have a SIM in each, although I suspect I may end up swapping SIMs around a bit and this could lead to accidents like enabling data roaming on the phone which contains the expensive "normal" SIM. I'm sure how I handle this will evolve with experience. I may well end up leaving the Priv in my room and only using it as a pseudo-laptop when I'm there and always carrying the HTC out with me normally, but even if that works out as I expect it's not all that clear to me if the "travel" SIM would be better living in the Priv or the HTC - I would like to be able to use data while out and about, but then again if I do get the phone lost or stolen I'd rather not lose the "irreplaceable" travel SIM with it and maybe I should have left that back at the presumably-more-secure hotel room in the Priv. I could imagine - if it's not insanely expensive - trying to buy a local SIM, sticking that in the HTC for out-and-about data use and keeping the travel SIM in the Priv back in my room, with the normal UK SIM stashed in my bag and only inserted periodically to check for text messages or if I end up needing to receive an authentication code on it (which shouldn't happen at the drop of a hat).
OK, looking at the "normal" SIM provider's FAQs, *everyone* who hasn't opted out has data billing capped at £41 per bill cycle. That would suck, but it is at least borderline tolerable if the worst happens. OK, and (I've taken a screenshot of this) they do implicitly confirm that the bill capping applies to roaming use, since they say that if you're in a non-inclusive destination and have a £0 cap you won't be able to use your phone, as any usage will be chargeable. So as long as the £5 cap is being applied, the potential downsides to taking the "normal" SIM abroad with me are very limited, and it could turn out to be useful.
2139 Being very lazy about getting on with my trip preparation, but I have been thinking about buying a couple of quid of Skype credit so I can call arbitrary numbers back in the UK. Obviously I hope to be able to use my "travel" UK SIM for that (Three's Go Roam or whatever they call it now), but if that doesn't work properly (as it didn't in Guatemala) or I simply lose that SIM/have it stolen it's good to have Skype as a fallback option, and I don't want to be fighting with a credit card company trying to authorise a purchase of Skype credit when I'm abroad and presumably already in the middle of some kind of banking snarl-up to require me to be making the phone call in the first place.
Skype's website is frankly confusing; the page showing the UK call rates has some kind of disclaimer about rates potentially being different if you're calling from outside the EEA, even though another page says the cost of a call depends on where you're calling *to* not where you're calling *from*. I also don't see how in practice this matters; surely Skype are routing my call via the internet until it reaches some point in the UK where they will initiate a normal telephone call. It wouldn't matter so much except it just says "standard rates" apply where the call originates outside the EEA, except the *only* rate information is that page with the "different outside the EEA" note at the bottom.
Just for the hell of it I did actually chat online with their support. Apparently the per-minute rates are the same (which I think is about 2p/minute for a regular UK landline; I may end up getting stiffed for 10.8p/min if I'm in a panic and have to call an 08xxx number, but that's tolerable) but the connection cost may be different and that is controlled by the UK telecoms provider for the number, but is usually less than the per-minute rate. I can't say I'm super confident about this information, but it's probably OK and I'm only looking at buying a couple of quid of credit anyway.
Ah no, I see you don't get to *choose* how much Skype credit you buy. There are three options, the smallest of which is £5, and that's that. (It's also a bit annoying that they won't offer me the option to pay in USD, as I have some USD in my PayPal account which I'd rather spend directly to avoid poor exchange rates and fees. Though I guess Skype might then end up charging me crappy exchange rates if they have my account marked as a GBP account.)
I'm probably going to have to buy this anyway, but I'm going to sleep on it now. I feel like I'm being played and don't want to just get caught up in the momentum of "well I was going to top up so I'll just accept being forced to pay one of three pre-selected amounts. I mean, maybe having a *minimum* is fair enough, but why not let me choose an arbitrary larger amount? It would be super convenient for me if I could make it £7, as I have a non-top-upabble prepaid card with £7 on which I'm struggling to use because I need to spend *exactly* £7 on it.
OK, poking around on the site it looks like they will let me change my account currency and I can select USD. This would involve them converting my tiny £0.18 balance at a possibly sub-optimal rate, but I could live with that. They do support PayPal so I might *hope* I would then be able to pay with my USD PayPal balance, and perhaps even only buy $5 credit not £5 credit.
Right, Skype appear (not unreasonably) to use IP geolocation to show prices, at least when you're not lgged in. Assuming I would simply be a USD customer with no iffiness after a change of currency, it would be 2.3 cents/minute to call the UK and I could probably top up $5. In GBP they want to charge me 2p/minute; as of right now, Google says 2p/minute is 2.6 cents/minute, so all else being equal (which it may very well not be) I am getting a small saving here from having a USD account on Skype. Although in reality I'm more interested in minimising the amount of credit I have to buy and maybe being able to use that inconvenient USD PayPal balance up a bit.
Still probably going to sleep on this. It's petty but I'm going to feel stupid if I try to play games and end up getting stung with a few quid in fees somewhere.
8th Jan Tinkering with the new phone and the Three app, it looks like they've actually improved their deal since last time - it now seems to be £10 for *4GB* data and unlimited calls/texts for 30 days. Can't help wondering if there's a catch, but anyway. I don't want to top up until nearly the last minute as that way I may be able to avoid having to pay for four addons over the course of my 90 day trip.
Thu 9th 0042 Right, I went ahead and boldly changed my Skype account to USD (my £0.18 turning into $0.22, which is fine) and I seem to have been able to top up $5 using my USD PayPal balance without incurring any stray fees. I have a $5.22 balance at Skype, which should be good for about 200 minutes of calls, and I've managed to use some of my relatively useless USD balance at PayPal and I've managed to top up less than the £5 minimum had I left my account in GBP. I don't intend to use Skype for making phone calls routinely, but it's always good to have multiple options for communication as and when things go tits up. And if I don't buy a Colombian SIM card, it may useful for calling Colombian numbers on, should the need arise, as those would be prohibitively expensive on either of my UK SIMs.
1906 I've had an e-mail from booking.com reminding me that my free cancellation period on the Cartagena accommodation is nearly up, which is quite nice really. I don't think there's any reason I would want to cancel. I've just cross-checked the flight from Bogota-Cartagena with the check in date and they match, and it's not as if I've suddenly come across any new information which would make me think the booking is a bad idea. I just checked the booking.com reviews, there are a couple of newish ones but both are glowing, so it's not as if I've suddenly got reason to believe this is a terrible place. They're very very gently (in a totally inoffensive way) offering to upgrade me to a double bed for a couple of quid for the entire stay, but I'm not really that bothered. Actually it's confusing, there are three upgrade options and the next is £20+ more and is still a double bed; perhaps the room is larger but there's no actual size shown (it just says "Room size: m^2" for both with no actual figure). This makes me particularly disinclined to upgrade. Also it may well be that a cheaper double bed is going to have less non-bed floor space making the room feel extra cramped. Best not to fiddle at the moment, stick with my initial choice and if necessary or desirable I can always discuss paying for a room upgrade once I'm there, and if I decide to stay for more than my pre-booked nearly-a-week I can of course choose a different room for the following week's booking.
1924 FFS. I've just thought I'd go and do a bit of prep and print out some stuff ready for the trip, and it seems that the place in Cartagena is *not* a hostel or hotel with a 24h desk and I need to schedule a time to check in with the host. Cocksuckers. This was *not* clear when I booked. I am probably not going to cancel - the price is good and it has good reviews and I fucking hate choosing accommodation - but this is fucking annoying. I will schedule this once I decide on how to travel from the airport to the accommodation; if I decide to go with any transfer service the accommodation offers then that would influence what we agree. At least by this point I will have been in the country for a few days and should have established if I have mobile data and had a chance to buy a local SIM if necessary.
On the plus side, the booking confirmation does give the exact latitude/longitude of the accommodation, which is a nice touch. Yes, it's *probably* on Google Maps by name, but it's good to have this explicit information to avoid any confusion.
Without having done any further research, I note (again; I saw it when I booked) the Bogotá accommodation near the airport says it is COP15,000 approx for a taxi from the airport to the accommodation or they will arrange a pickup for COP25,000. I think that's about an extra £2.50; given I expect to be frazzled (irrational or not) by the time I get there, I just may splurge on pre-booking this, but I will do a bit of research first. It also says there is a bus which costs COP1,700 (virtually free), but given a) I will have my bag with all my belongings with me b) it will be dark (if only early evening) c) I will be absolutely fresh off the boat with my Spanish relatively rusty d) I will be knackered after the flight, this seems penny wise pound foolish. It *does* tempt me, and it feels a bit weak not to go for this option, but all the same I'm probably not. Just possibly on other days and other airport transfers I might go by public bus but not this one. (Actually the price is a bit more complicated; that COP15,000 price is if you go to the "ground transportation terminal"; if you take a taxi from the airport it's around COP15,000-COP20,000, there is a warning about the taxi driver trying to take you to another hotel and it also says the price cannot exceed COP20,000 and not to let them charge you more. FFS. This may just be the hotel trying to entice you into their COP25,000 pickup, and/or it may be that although these minor scams *do* occur they are not a really regular problem and you're unlikely to experience them.)
OK, that's everything printed out in duplicate and copies also stashed as PDFs on Dropbox - this is the two flights (London-Bogota and Bogota-Cartagena) and the two sets of accommodation. I've actually only printed one copy of the London-Bogota flight confirmation as I assume (despite having reserved seats) I can/must check in online the day before and therefore I will be printing the resulting boarding pass in duplicate at that point - having a single printout of the flight details with the booking number on will do, I will only need it if my printer breaks the day before the flight or similar.
2036 I have to say, I feel a bit more positive and even excited about the trip for having made this bit of an effort to work on the preparations.
I have no idea how authoritative it is, but I found https://medellinguru.com/lonely-planet-colombia/ which seems to be very negative about the 2018 Lonely Planet Colombia guide book. This makes me even more disinclined to splurge the full price when I already own the 2012 edition.
11th Jan 0055 Just tested USB OTG with my SD card reader on the Priv; there's no logical reason this shouldn't have worked, but seemed prudent to try it.
13th Jan 1347 I really should post this lot, shouldn't I? Anyway, misc ramblings.
Had a slightly confused (it was >2am) chat with Z+D on Saturday night about airport transfers in Colombia. I think - not sure I hadn't already concluded this - I will splurge/allow the hotel to manipulate me into paying for their COP25k transfer from the airport in Bogotá (rather than hoping I can pay 15-20k for a taxi I sort out myself on arrival), because modulo "will they bother to turn up?" type worries, this way I can minimise stress and hassle on the already emotionally fraught outbound trip. I will probably look to book this in the next day or two. I will see how I feel about getting to the airport to fly to Cartagena - it just may be possible, once I've had a day or two lurking around and perhaps even tried doing it, for me to walk (20 mins) to the airport from that hotel, or maybe the public bus doesn't look too scary. Not so sure about arrival in Cartagena; it's not too clear the accommodation offers a service anyway, but I will have a read around on the web over the next few days. This is marginally less critical, I could really do this research once I'm in Bogotá if I want, but it's probably best to do it now if I can.
I am procrastinating a bit on my preparations (e.g. checking I have everything, trial packing the new bag) but am doing a bit. Sort of under pressure wrt these "physical" preparations as I'm off up to Skegness tomorrow. I am trying to tell myself that I can watch all the Youtube videos and the like I want once I'm actually on holiday. :-) Obviously I don't want to do nothing but that kind of thing, but it's an undeniable fact that I can't/won't be busy socialising or sightseeing or drinking on my own in bars and worrying about how to get home safely every single night, so while I obviously want to resist the temptation to overdo it the reality is if anything I'm going to be *desperate* for decent content I haven't watched once I'm on the trip, and if anything I should be saving it up now rather than watching it as part of my procrastination.
1836 Have completed a test pack of the new bag. I don't quite have everything in but even with a mostly full 500ml water bottle it's weighing at 5.5kg. This seems way too good to be true. It doesn't include the fleece (about 500g empty, and I would have a few bits and pieces in its pockets) as I will be wearing this during the flight - but yes, the fleece does (just) fit in the bag along with the other stuff - and 77g of PackTowl but it is pretty much everything else as far as I can see, including my plastic bag of liquids. The new bag (even with the fleece in) will fit inside the old one and the old one will still zip up, and the new one is pretty squishy, so fingers crossed I am not going to get shafted on hand baggage size limits here (and of course the fleece won't be in the bag when I am going through airports, as they're air conditioned and by wearing it I avoid it bulking out the bag).
I hope this new bag holds up; there's a comforting solidity to the old bag (Voyageur, as recommended by onebag.com, and having taken it on every trip since 2010 onwards I know it's pretty rugged) but the new bag has to be a worthwhile experiment since the saving on weight is impressive. I obviously haven't taken the new bag out but I did put it on in the flat for a few minutes and it's almost light enough to be negligible. I suppose if I don't get on with it, barring really nasty surprises where it just tears right open in the middle of nowhere, I can always buy a cheap bag over there and pack the ultra-light one inside to avoid throwing it out, and it shouldn't come to that really.
The Gorillapod is not terribly heavy, I'm not concerned about its larger physical size and it is probably a lot more flexible (no pun intended). I don't use it a lot, but as I've said before I do like to use it for taking photos out of the windows or off the balconies of my accommodation, so it doesn't seem ridiculous to be taking it with me. A compact camera Tiltpod would probably replace 50-75% of its functionality at a lower weight, but the saving in weight wouldn't be huge and I would be losing something. (Although I've not done it before, I've also seen a suggestion that a Gorillapod or similar tripod can be used as a stand to prop up a smartphone for watching videos on; on the last trips I was reduced to trying to contrive something out of miscellaneous items.)
There's no denying being able to hold a smartphone steady at an angle would help reduce my desire to have a separate compact camera, which would be quite a weight saving by the time you get rid of not just the camera but the battery charger and cable and spare battery. But as I've said before, I often feel a lot safer/more relaxed about pulling my compact camera out in random public spaces than I do pulling my smartphone out - I'd much rather have the camera snatched out of my hand than my phone. And I'd still be worried about the smartphone falling out of the window and being lost/damaged, whereas the compact camera has a wrist strap I can use to guard against that. And there's the optical zoom too.
Anyway, just making a note to help remind me in future if I want to consider alternatives in this area.
8th Dec I went over to Decathlon at Canada Water yesterday; got some synthetic socks and a couple of 70% merino 30% synthetic long-sleeved T-shirts. I didn't really have any trouble with the silk+polyester-or-cotton socks I bought at Next a good while back which I used on the last trip, but some of them are going a bit at the toes so I wanted to get some replacements; if these new ones seem any good I may go back and get a couple more pairs. I've washed one of the new T-shirts tonight (at 30C) to see if it shrinks; this way if it does I can maybe consider taking the unwashed one back for a refund rather than having two ruined ones. It occurred to me I also need to test it to see how easy it is to dry with a towel and hanging overnight - today it had the benefit of a spin rinse in the machine, though as usual I haven't used the tumble dryer - before I take the tags off the second one.
I have been pretty lazy/procrastinaty about making further plans for the trip. It would be good to get some accommodation booked for my arrival in Bogotá (probably near the airport, as I probably said in a previous entry), and to have some rough idea for which city I'm going to go after that first night or two in Bogotá, how I'll get there and (assuming it's by bus) where I need to go to buy the ticket and how convenient it is to get to the bus terminal from my accommodation. I don't intend to plan the trip as a whole out in excruciating detail at this point - though I do also think it would be good to have a rough possible itinerary - but since on arrival I'm treating Bogotá as just a brief layover I do need to decide before I go (and ideally ASAP, so I can book stuff) where my first non-Bogotá stop will be, and I can then consider booking accommodation there and maybe even transport from Bogotá to there (especially if it will be by air).
[time passes] Right, I've forced myself to have a very quick poke at the guide book, with respect to starting to formulate a rough itinerary. I don't have one yet, but I note the (dated) guide book also agrees with the F&CO website that you shouldn't travel by bus or coach overnight. And Cartagena, for example, is apparently a 20 hour bus trip from Bogotá (according to the guide book, but I doubt the travel time has changed much), which would seem therefore to be completely ruled out. However, I've had a quick look at flight prices online and - while I am looking at dates well in advance at this point (I arbitrarily picked 25th January) - there are numerous flights from Bogotá to Cali in the £26-£38 range, which does look decidedly affordable. (Obviously there's a bit more for getting to/from the airport at either end, but if I'm travelling in daylight and given I do more-or-less speak Spanish I may well be able to use public transport to do these airport transfers.) Maybe the lack of security of long-distance bus travel means most locals are going to be flying instead of taking the bus and that means there's more demand and therefore flights aren't such a luxury item as they seem to be in other places I've been in South America (though to be fair, I don't normally pay too much attention; if bus is an option, I tend to go for it on slightly vague principles).
Now it may be that on closer inspection there would be enough points of interest to break down a Bogotá-Cartagena journey into maybe four separate legs of about 5 hours each, but it seems a bit implausible that there would be suitably large towns at that precise a level of spacing, and that is already with four legs. The impression I've formed is that from a safety POV you really don't want to be in overly rural areas unless (maybe) they are noted tourist destinations, so it does look like the plan has to be to use air travel for the longer hops and only use buses for visiting places within (say) 100km of a major city.
I've already skimmed the guide book (Colombia section; remember it's actually a South America guidebook) once, but I should probably go through it again and make some notes on places/things I might want to see or do, then once I have those notes I could use them to formulate a possibly sensible set of flights (I don't want to be zig-zagging like crazy all over the country, as presumably distance correlates with price). I wouldn't book those flights in advance, but it would reduce the chances of me covering more distance than necessary.
[time passes] Happened to check on MSE travel cards page and I noticed there's a new bank Bó (backed by NatWest) which offers a travel-friendly Visa debit card; one of these would have been super handy in Argentina, so I've applied. This involves the same kind of massively intrusive sign up process I had with my NatWest current account; you might have thought the fact I already have a NatWest current account would eliminate the need for this, but hey, why not jerk me around a bit anyway? Still, assuming this goes through that will be useful. It's also an extra card I can take with me with a low "credit limit" (I'd probably just keep a couple of hundred quid in the account, and it's a debit card) which isn't too bad for my personal security.
9th Dec I did a test "hand dry" of the wool/acrylic T-shirt, seemed to be fine - not even that wet after wringing out in a towel, dry the next morning after hanging overnight.
Right, haven't heard back from Nomad Travel despite calling over a week ago so I've called Superdrug and managed to get three appointments for rabies vaccination. At least according to the (non-medically-trained) receptionist I spoke to the three doses seem to have to be given on precisely days 1, 7 and 21-28 so it's lucky this fits in round Christmas and my plan to probably spend a week up in Skegness between Christmas and flying out. First appointment is this Wednesday. I'm a bit nervy this is going to mean I feel somehow physically shit over Christmas, but it can't be helped - I am *not* looking this up, just have to go through with it regardless, and I would guess it's probably just going to be a question of soreness for a few days after each injection. I really should have got this done months ago given it lasts ten years, but I guess this way I might get a bit more "use" out of the ten year duration instead of wasting six months of it in the UK, and it is what it is at this point. This will cost 3x£58; the first appointment is 30 mins as it involves a nurse consultation, the others 15 minutes, but the consultation is "free".
11th Dec Got the first rabies vaccination done a few hours ago. Doesn't hurt yet. I asked the nurse (pharmacist?) injecting me what the side-effects would be and I think this is just like any other vaccination, it's not like because it's rabies it's really painful. Probably a stupid thought on my part in the first place but anyway.
Not *super* happy that he seemed to be very keen to upsell me on three or four other vaccinations I had never heard of, despite looking on the NHS-recommended website beforehand. I was (I hope) polite but firm, brought a sheet of paper with his recommendations on and said I'd look into them but I didn't let him railroad me in to getting them all done today. Also a bit miffed that I apparently didn't have the two follow-up appointments made despite us discussing them when I called to book this first appointment; luckily I called them when I left the shop and managed to get appointments OK, but given the apparently quite precise vaccination schedule needed this could have turned into a bit of a mare if I couldn't get the follow-up appointments after all.
I will look into those other vaccinations later but gut feeling is I'm not having any of them. At least one of them has a pretty tight vaccination schedule which might not fit with the fact I'm going to be away for slightly over two weeks over Christmas.
Oh, and despite me showing him my vaccination booklet as he requested, he "didn't notice" I'd already had diptheria, tetanus & polio only last year and that was up to date and included this in the swathe of recommended vaccines - luckily I did notice and query this and he apologised and acknowledged the mistake. This probably was a genuine slip, but really I did not like the attempt at upselling and it gave me a bad feeling. Actually I think the fact that he recommended this vaccination and I'm thinking "hang on, didn't I already have that?" made me particularly unreceptive to his other suggestions.
13th Dec FWIW, my left arm was the tiniest bit sore when I went to bed on the night (early morning of next day, really) of 11th, and I haven't really had any trouble with it; it's maybe the tiniest bit sore now, but it's never really been a significant concern and I've mostly just forgotten I've been vaccinated (albeit only part 1 of 3). Maybe the guy who injected me was very good at what he does or it's just lucky.
14th Dec Forcing myself to think about further trip preparations, I wonder if I should go and buy loads more of the socks I got from Decathlon the other weekend. I normally take five pairs of socks with me, if all five pairs were identical it would help if any get lost in laundry accidents - obviously if I lose one that's always crap, but if I lose two and they're all identical I still have four matching pairs. Those socks are also black but have a sort of pattern on the foot which might make them a little bit more distinctive - I can say to laundry staff "they looked like these" and show them one of the other pairs, and they're not just "black socks" or "black socks with a very subtle coloured stripe" like the ones I took last time.
It sounds like it should be trivial, but I've had problems in the past managing my dirty clothes. I tend to stuff them into a solid carrier bag, but it's not possible to fasten the top and it often comes open. I think I have tried to use two carrier bags, one for underwear and one for other things, so that the presumably-dirtier underwear doesn't contaminate the other clothes (particularly important if some kind of mini-emergency means I'm forced to re-wear an item of outer clothing without washing it first), but I'm not sure. I've been intermittently poking on the web to try to find a better solution, I think I might see if I can get a couple of "dry bags" or similar - one large enough for the bulkier clothes, one small one for dirty underwear. This should also have the beneficial effect of isolating the dirty underwear.
Experimenting with a random plastic container just to estimate volume, four tops (without any significant squeezing) take about six litres. Four sets of underwear is about 1.75 litres with mild by-hand squeezing; yes, I also experimented with an 1800ml ice cream tub and that just about holds the underwear.
It occurs to me that although I really don't want to have to resort to this, these dry bags could be attached on the outside of my new relatively small backpack to expand capacity if I really come unstuck. If nothing else, I could maybe do this when I'm staying in one place - if they're attached to the backpack I won't lose them or leave them behind by mistake - to avoid continually packing and unpacking the backpack to get stuff in and out, and only go to the trouble of packing everything neatly-ish inside it when I'm going to move to a new place. I hope this won't be necessary, but since the new backpack and its reduced capacity and less convenient form factor are an experiment it would be good to have options.
15th Dec Just realised by accident that I actually have an electronic Colombia guide book purchased in 2014. Lonely Planet Colombia, 6th edition, published 2012. Checking their website, the latest is 8th edition, published 2018; the electronic version costs £8.44 or £2 per chapter. Not sure if I'll splurge on that or not. Quick poke on web fails to turn up a discount code that works. Rough Guide to Colombia seemst to be £11.99.
The thing is that as I've waffled about before, I don't find a lot of the details in the guide book that helpful. The acommodation is usually not on the booking sites I check, even a guide published in 2018 is going to be over a year out of date with regard to things like safety, I find the tone of the guidebooks ("obviously you're a 20 year old eco-fanatic who makes friends easily, loves to party and worships indigenous cultures while reviling capitalism") offputting. What's useful is having a broad overview of the country, interesting sites, hints on bus routes and journey times and so forth, and I'm not sure that changes as rapidly or is worth paying for an up-to-date copy of the guidebook. In terms of safety I'm probably going to get better advice from sites like the F&CO and maybe the web, and as for accommodation in reality I'm almost always going to be going for something which is one on of the handful of big booking websites and trust the reviews on there.
Still, I'm glad I found this electronic guidebook - if I'd thought the only guidebook I had was the 2010 vintage paperback, I might well have bought an electronic copy. As it is I'll mull over this.
17th Dec Two completely unrelated and not novel thoughts but both have recently occurred to me again so let me jot them down here:
1) The trip should give my fingers and especially my right little finger/wrist a break from typing/mouse strain. Since I don't take a laptop with me, all my geeking out will be done on my smartphone, and even though it has a keyboard it's completely different to type on.
2) It doesn't feel entirely good, but it is the case, that I *really* don't like thinking about the trip in some sense. I am not flicking through the guide book with a sense of joy, jotting down places I "simply must visit" or engaging in plesant daydreams of time spent doing activity X or Y. If memory serves it's often like this *during* the trip too; deciding where to go next and sorting out travel and accommodation feels like a terrible chore. The "pain" of knowing I have to do this sometimes takes the shine off other day-to-day activities. I don't know if this is a problem or not, maybe it's just how I am, maybe I should confront this, I really don't know, but anyway, just noting the thought down.
On point 2, there might be an argument for forcing myself to ensure I do have a "default" itinerary in mind before I leave home. I wouldn't be *forced* to stick to it if something interesting came up, but in the absence of any specific desires to go to place X or not go to place Y based on new information, it would reduce the amount of on-the-fly decision making needed and take that pain away from the trip itself.
[later] I forced myself to skim through the guide book and I've scribbled down a few places I'd sort of like to visit if I can, though hardly any of them are "must dos"; if I find myself in place X and I like it and want to stay there for two months, that's fine. I haven't tried to stitch these together into a vaguely geographically coherent itinerary yet.
Bit edgy re security; I haven't looked into accommodation or anything at all yet, but I was wondering if I could get an Uber from the airport and apparently (trying to filter away the self-righteousness of some forum commenters) they are not exactly legal in Colombia, and although they're widely used the police and/or taxi drivers make it imprudent to use them to/from the airport. Of course - and I am bearing in mind this is fuckwits on an internet forum - what I read also makes it sound like taking a regular taxi is not completely safe, and I am now fearing I'm going to get mugged while standing on the street waiting for a pre-arrange taxi or Uber to pick me up. But I'm sure this is just the regular jitters, and as for the actual practicalities of arranging taxis (which I fear I may have to rely on more than I normally do, depending on whether it's actually safe to walk around in the evening where I am) I can look into that properly later on. All this paranoia was prompted merely by random incidental (dis)information while trying to see if Uber were an option.
Uber's own website (at least the page which came up from my web search) gives no information to the effect that they're not legal in Colombia. Maybe they in fact are. The impression I got from the forum was that they may not be legal but not actually illegal either. Frankly I don't have a fucking clue. I suppose what's really important to me here and now is that I shouldn't plan on using them to/from the airport in Bogotá.
[bit later] Right, I've made a heroic effort and spent a few minutes scribbling on a swiped-from-Google-image-search printed map of the country using my notes from earlier. This is nowhere near a plan yet, but I'm kind of thinking (here, pre-book means "ideally in the next few days, certainly before I leave the UK"):
- Fly into Bogotá, obviously (I've already booked this).
- Pre-book a couple of nights in somewhere with a private room near-ish to the airport if possible (to minimise transport hassles). Hostel is fine, maybe even good, but I want a private room post-flight. This will let me get over the flights - that sounds a bit stupid, I mean, you just sit on your arse for 15 hours, really, but still, flights always take it out of me - and maybe start to find my feet with the country before I do anything else.
- Pre-book a flight out of Bogotá to Cartagena. Given my willingness to stay "indefinitely" in a single place if I find it congenial (and I obviously kind of hope I *do* find somewhere suitably congenial), I think it makes sense to go to Cartagena first as it's the closest I come to having somewhere I "must" go.
- Pre-book at least a couple of nights and perhaps getting on for a week's accomodation in Cartagena. At least the first couple of nights should be in a private room, and given I don't want to be changing accommodation before I get settled in I probably will be booking for nearer a week and will therefore be booking a private room for a week.
- Make sure I've done as much research as I can on transport to/from the airport in Bogotá and Cartagena before I go; if my accommodation offers cheap-ish and stress-free transfers, take that. As always, I think it's (rationally) more stressful and feels more vulnerable to be in transit with my bag and all my worldly possessions and all my forms of access to money than it does walking the street with my bag relatively safe back at my accommodation, so I need to minimise the stress and risk of an incident early in the trip while in transit.
- Spend a few days being casually touristy in Cartagena. See how I get on. Look for Spanish schools and/or language exchange evenings. Try to get a feel for how to get around safely within the city, especially after dark.
- I will probably want to extend my stay past the initial pre-booked accommodation, but once I've seen what it's like and got a feel for the geography I can consider other options, be they airbnb flats, airbnb homestays, hostels, whatever. I could imagine extending my stay a week at a time, perhaps changing accommodation every week depending on how I feel and what I'm doing.
- Consider using Cartagena as a base for trips of several days (weeks, even, if I want to) to nearby places by bus, e.g. Barranquilla or Santa Marta. I'll use planes if it seems best, but a few hours by bus to somewhere nearby is probably OK, and some mid-size places probably won't have airports of their own anyway. I don't want to be going anywhere extremely rural without serious safety advice, of course.
- When I feel sated with Cartagena and the surrounding region, fly down to Cali.
- Repeat the "settle in for a few days, make sure I have nice private accommodation for the first few days at least, make sure I've got the transfer from the airport to my acommodation as sorted as I can in advance, extend accommodation until I'm fed up, use the city as a base for side-trips to other places of interest in the region" routine from Cali.
- Fly to Medellin, repeat the routine. It's a bit silly but I think the main reason I'm tempted to includ Medellin is that I'd like to visit El Peñol nearby, simply because it sounds kind of cool from reading about it in the guidebook - but it's not AFAICT the kind of "yes, I simply must see it" attraction you'd normally be talking about on a high level itinerary like this.
- Fly to Bogotá, repeat the routine - except I've already spent a week in Bogotá, so I'd probably be inclined to move straight on to side-trips (e.g. to Tunja, which is apparently about three hours away by bus). This leaves me in/near Bogotá ready for the flight home; if I have lots of time free because I never really settled in any of the other places, I can obviously insert some other cities/regions between Medellin and Bogota.
I could imagine swapping Medellin and Cali in that itinerary. My quick-glance-at-the-guide-book impression is that Cartagena and Cali are both pretty warm, whereas Medellin is described as "city of eternal spring" and may be more comfortable. So on the one hand, maybe it would be a nice break between Cartagena and Cali in that sense, but on the other hand maybe if I've acclimatised in Cartagena it would make Cali more comfortable to go there without losing any acclimatisation in Medellin first. (And on this note, I have to expect that the first week or two in Cartagena I'm going to be feeling "fuck, it's too hot" until I do get acclimatised. And maybe springing for somewhere which has aircon - and using it sparingly so I *do* acclimatise - would be a good idea.)
I don't expect this plan to survive contact with the flight/accommodation booking web sites ("it costs *how much* to fly to Cartagena in high season? And even a dorm bed costs *that* much? Fuck that!"), but at least it's a starting point. As I've probably already said (wankily smug way of putting it as it unfortunately is) I'd rather go "deep than broad" given the chance, and I don't have to "do" all the tourist high spots in this trip. Hell, I don't actually have to do any of them, but barring some really unfortunate experience putting me off the country altogether, I can and probably will return to the country again in the future and can visit some other areas then.
With regard to the side trips, I don't mean that I'd necessary be retaining any accommodation or leaving any of my belongings in the city because I'd only be gone overnight. I just mean that the impression I get is that long-distance travel by bus is not really smart or necessary, but around each city is a region where it's both safe and necessary to travel by bus for a few hours to get to smaller but probably perfectly safe (perhaps even safer?) towns, so I have to fly into and out of these cities at each separate stage of the trip, but once I'm in that region I can travel "locally" by bus.
I'm going to resist the urge to ride this wave of energy and start looking at accommodation or flights yet, because I do want to mull over this very sketchy plan first. Let me compromise with myself and just do a very quick look for accommodation near-ish to Bogotá airport. OK, there are a couple of hostels with private rooms (shared bathroom, but that's OK) near the airport in the £12-15/night price range, at least one of them says "shuttle bus" under facilities, I haven't bothered to see if that's airport pick up or only a bus *to* the airport or checked prices, but this seems manageable. I wouldn't be planning on going into Bogotá city centre during this initial stay, I'd be quite happy to just wander round the neighbourhood, shove my head in the church for a look round, practice ordering in some cheap restaurant, etc, for a day or two before catching the onward flight. hostelworld.com has at least one of those places at "only 2 rooms available, selling out fast"; I've been pressured by this kind of shit before, I don't want to dither unnecessarily but I'm not being pushed right now. Give it a day or two to sleep on it and then take a look at actually booking something.
Gut feeling is to avoid airbnb for this initial stage of the trip; I *should* have mobile data on my Three SIM over there, but I could easily see this not working. My experiences of airbnb suggest that you really need WhatsApp access from the street for it not to be a complete nightmare, and if it goes tits up you maybe need to be able to make good old fashioned phone calls too. That's fine if, for example, I've been in Cartagena 4-5 days and have decided I want to stay another week and am just moving within the city to airbnb accommodation; it's not so fine if I've just got off a flight and I'm stressed and feeling vulnerable. I want a "proper" ho(s)tel with staff on site who can open the door and let me in whenever I turn up. If my Three SIM doesn't work properly when I arrive I can look into buying a local SIM, but I don't want to be faffing with that kind of thing before I can check into my initial accommodation.
18th Dec Looks like Lonely Planet have a sale on and are offering all their ebooks for £4.99. This is a bit tempting. It's hardly a huge sum and it would mean I have a guide book with relatively up to date information (sometimes important if I find myself in accommodation with no working wifi), on the other hand given I do have my existing ebook version published in 2012 I'm a bit reluctant to buy it again. I don't think the sale ends that soon and I'll sleep on it.
I mean, if it were 1990, or even 2006 in the relatively early dawn of travel information and booking accommodation online being a thing, I'd absolutely want an up-to-date guidebook, because it would be one of my primary sources of information. But as I already waffled about, nowadays it's useful for an overview and one possible source of information to be weighed up with other sources, but it's just not that critical. If I "enjoyed" reading the guide book more, if it didn't seem so smugly at odds with my own personal circumstances and beliefs, maybe I'd be really chuffed to have the latest edition and browse it excitedly for cool things to see and do, but I don't. However, as I say, £4.99 really isn't a lot of money and it's probably worth it. If nothing else I'm less likely to try to mentally adjust information about safety in the guidebook and get it wrong in one direction or another. Still going to sleep on it though.
19th Dec I had actually been mildly worried by a mention in the outdated guide book suggesting the immigration official on arrival may have a tendency to write <90 days on your passport stamp; since I have flights booked to give me an exact 90 day trip and I don't plan to cross any borders during that time, this could be a bit of a mess. However, a quick poke on the web seems to suggest that I will most likely be given 90 days, and it also appears possible to pay for an extension (at an annoying-but-tolerable cost of USD30) online. Maybe this is an example of the kind of stress - if not actual problem - caused by having an outdated guide book.
21st Dec 2300ish Right, a quick poke on expedia (not tried any comparison sites) shows flights from Bogotá to Cartagena on Sunday 26th January for £45 one way including taxes; this may not include checked baggage but I don't need that, and it may not include reserved seats but I can probably take a punt on a randomly allocated shitty seat for a 1h 25m flight. This is with LATAM and there are loads of flights, including one 1233-1358 which looks pretty decent, that would allow me to make both airport transits in broad daylight and even if I got to the airport a couple of hours before the flight it doesn't require getting up insanely early. Sunday 26th is a little arbitrary, but that gives me three nights and two full days in Bogotá to recover from the long flights and start to find my feet. I could fly the day before for the same price. Not booking this now, but this shows that there are acceptable flights if I don't dither too much.
What about accomodation in Cartagena? As per my sketchy plan from a few days ago, let's just look for a private room for a week from Sunday 26th - at the moment I don't plan to book any of this, I am just checking that the plan seems feasible to implement then I'll sleep on it and maybe book in a day or so. OK, hostelworld has a decent-ish sounding (but only 2 rooms left!) place with private room-shared bathroom at £21/night; this is towards the low end, but there are a few options under £30/night and I think this is doable. I'd hope to be able to economise with a bit of intermittent dormitory accommodation and/or prices going down as high season passes, but that's acceptable.
And again just looking on hostelworld as this is a sanity check, what about Bogotá check in 23 Jan check out 26 Jan? Picking stuff near the airport. Yeah, there's at least one decent sounding place at £13/night (shared bathroom), not super clear if they will arrange pickup from the airport but it's very close anyway, and they will arrange (no price mentioned on first glance) transfer to the airport.
A possibly outdated (but no obvious reason to assume this) website says there is an official taxi service at Bogotá airport which you pay for before you exit the gates (thereby presumably avoiding any touts while I'm feeling tired and vulnerable) and that it costs about €16 for a ride to the city centre, taking 35 minutes; I'd therefore hope that it's not going to be ridiculously pricey to a hostel five minutes away. I *haven't* made any attempt at this point to search out more explicitly up to date information; one way or another I *have* to make this transit, and it's not the sort of thing which is going to cause me to cancel the entire trip. :-) This is one area where an up-to-date guidebook might be useful, and/or I could also make an effort to search on e.g. forums for recent advice too - right now I'm just sanity checking my basic plan, as I keep saying.
So this all looks broadly doable. Cartagena looks a bit pricier than I'd like, but it is the middle of high season when I'm going and it is tolerably priced anyway. I think I'm going to sleep on this and I may well go and book some stuff tomorrow, checking multiple sites for accommodation to get the best deal I can. hostelworld seems to advertise free cancellation if you book more than 7 days in advance, but then most of the places I look at have two different prices for the same room, one with free cancellation and another lower price without free cancellation, which seems to me to rather undermine the meaning of the word "free", but maybe I've overlooked something; this has all just been a hasty sanity check/priming my mind with the idea to see if I wake up with the screaming heebie-jeebies over the idea before I go and actually book.
23rd Dec 0050 OK, I've just paid £29 through kayak.co.uk for a flight from Bogotá to Cartagena on 26th January. This is no checked baggage, but I don't think I need it - the allowance is 8kg and the dimensions accommodate my Voyageur bag so should definitely acommodate the new bag which fits inside it. 8kg is probably fine and I can always e.g. wear my fleece on the plane (I probably will anyway). No idea about reserved seating but I am thinking I will take a chance on this for such a short flight. The flight is actually "handled" by kiwi.com and I have seen some not-exactly-iffy but semi-positive semi-worrying stuff about them on the web, but while a fuck-up here would be annoying this is *not* an international flight and it seems worth giving this cheap option a try.
OOOOK, first sign of fuckery. This is a LATAM flight, I had checked their baggage allowance on their own site, but the e-mail from kayak.co.uk says "1xpersonal item 4kg". This may well not be binding, I mean, LATAM presumably are the ones enforcing the rules and I won't have AFAIK a special "kiwi.com" ticket, this may just be kiwi showing lowest-common-denominator-for-all-the-airlines-they-do-with-their-weird-model. This is the *only* flight I will be booking before I'm in Colombia and in Cartagena and deciding when/where to go next, so let's see how this goes, if it goes well I will have confidence in them and can probably save big on my subsequent flights within the country, if I get stiffed I will know to avoid them like the plague.
I'm tempted to put off booking accommodation, but there were *other* flights on expedia (at least yesterday) at tolerable prices and I do pretty much want to fly that day so let's have a poke and see what we can do, then it will be sorted and I can forget about it.
booking.com has some homestays (private room) for £26 for three nights in Bogotá near airport, but this is probably quite airbnb-ish (I see mention of WhatsApp in some comments) and I don't need that kind of exposure to mobile roaming risk when I'm fresh off an international flight and it's getting dark.
0112 You fucking idiot Steve. Just gone and booked a hostel - splurging on a private ensuite room - near the airport for the first three nights. Not a problem as such, *except* I paid on a non-travel credit card and it *seems* to be saying that although the deposit has been charged in UK pounds, the property will be taking the rest of the payment themselves on the same card in Colombia pesos, which means I'm going to get stiffed with a fee from the credit card provider.
And yay, kiwi.com have e-mailed to say I have to call them within 12 hours to verify I am the payment card owner. FFS. Absolute cunts. This is particularly inconvenient give this means - although I'll almost certainly be up - I have to call them Monday *morning*, not Monday afternoon. On the other hand, I do note the e-mail says that if they don't hear from me, my booking will be declined *and I will be refunded*. So I suppose this does give me a kind of free cancellation option if after sleeping on it I feel bad about this.
I have drafted an e-mail (in Spanish; maybe it will make them feel better disposed to me) to the hostel asking if I can pay in cash on arrival or with a different card. TBH I half expect they *won't* charge my card unless I cancel anyway, in my experience if memory serves I nearly always end up paying everything except the initial deposit when I check in for hostelworld booking, but who knows? I haven't sent the e-mail yet; I am thinking the worst case (although a quick poke on the card's website seems they are being enragingly coy about just *saying what the fucking fee actually is*) is a 2.99% fee, which on this £40 transaction is galling but not the end of the world, and it may simply be easiest to avoid getting into a debate with the hostel. I suspect my e-mail is perfectly comprehensible but even if we assume my Spanish is flawless, what if they ask me to start e-mailing them the alternate credit card number? The last thing I need is to take any chances on any iffy transactions fucking up one of my travel credit cards. Yeah, fuck it, I'll sleep on this too but just have to eat that fee *if* it happens.
Anyway, the room is about £14.22 (from memory) a night, which isn't too bad. They do appear to offer an airport pickup service if you book in advance, though it costs more than a regular taxi. I'm not rushing to book that now, I've got enough shit to deal with already and it's not like I'm flying tomorrow.
0134 Need to chill a bit. While I've made at least one schoolboy mistake - using a non-travel card, because the website deluded me into thinking it was all in pounds - this *may* in practice not matter (I still think it's likely they'll want cash on arrival) and if they do charge that card in Colombian pesos I'll be out a bit over a quid, which isn't the end of the world.
I didn't spring extra for "free" cancellation (I suppose it is the cancellation which is free, not the fact that you *get* free cancellation for free), it would have "only" been an extra 70p-ish a night, but since I've already booked my very expensive international flight into Bogota on that day and I really don't expect my basic "camp out by the airport to recover and settle into the country for a few days" plan to change, I just didn't see the point in being psychologically engineering into paying for flexibility.
It's fucking annoying that I've got to call kiwi in the morning but it's not the end of the world and as I say this is perhaps a blessing in disguise as it gives me a free cancellation option. To be fair, and given that I will be wanting to book a few flights during my time in Colombia and that I do travel a modest amount, while this "4kg personal item" thing worries me a little, it does seem smart to give them a try as they could be a pretty good option to have and it's probably worth taking a bit of a chance on this initial flight.
Am I going to book the Cartagena accommodation? Given it *is* peak season there and there are other flight options if I end up getting the kiwi booking voluntarily or involuntarily cancelled, I will have a look now. Then I can maybe feel I've got this sorted and mostly forget about it until I actually get to Colombia.
0150 OK, I've had a brief poke on hostelworld and expedia for accommodation in Cartagena. expedia is capable of sorting by price, but you can't filter out dormitories so it's impossible to find a cheap private room. hostelworld has a bizarre idea of sorting by price, it certainly isn't sorting by the price of the private rooms - yes, looks like it sorts by dorm price, even if you filter the dorms out. FFS. Anyway, this doesn't feel good - Cartagena is a big place, I need to read up on where I should stay geographically, some of the reviews (as always) are mixed ("I woke up in the middle of the night to find myself being bitten by red ants" - but I'll still give a 6.0 "good" rating!?) and this is a more "critical" decision than merely where to stay when I first get into the country, since in Bogotá the plan hinges on staying near the airport so there's no decision to make on location. I'm feeling surprisingly frazzled by all this activity tonight, I'm going to sleep on it, will probably call kiwi to try to convince them to go ahead with my flight booking in the morning and then maybe "tomorrow" night or if not shortly after Christmas I can read up a bit about Cartagena and where to stay and book some accommodation in a more chilled frame of mind. (And a fair few of the places on hostelworld have no or very few reviews, which doesn't inspire confidence. But the real issue is that right now I'm feeling stressed out and I haven't done my homework on the geography of Cartagena and it would be foolish to book without doing that first.)
0208 OK, I'm still feeling pretty fucking stressed. I've done a bit more poking around on the web and finding deeply mixed info regarding kiwi. However, I have pretended to go book the same flight directly on their own web site and it *does* say (pretty early on) that there is a 4kg personal item allowance (and the dimensions are quite small). I have no idea if this *is* the case and the airline is going to enforce kiwi's crappy allowance because I'm on a special ticket, but I'm disinclined to take the chance. The fact that this wasn't made apparent to me before I booked is I think the fault of kayak's integration with kiwi.com - that doesn't make it suck any less, but I can't strictly blame kiwi for that. There's no option to pay extra for a "generous" 8kg standard cabin baggage allowance, I'd have to pay £11 (which in itself is still *relatively* cheap) to check a bag, but I don't *want* to check a bag and risk losing it etc if I can help it.
It doesn't look like I would have any cancellation rights on kiwi normally - I suspect I could maybe argue the toss about not being warned up front of the 4kg personal item limit - but since this payment verification thing effectively gives me a get-out-of-jail-free card, I'm probably going to take it and just not call them. They have sent me an e-mail saying I will be refunded if I don't call, so I'd assume I'm on fairly solid ground to argue the toss if I don't get refunded, and ultimately while it would suck £29 isn't the end of the world. There are no threats or mentions of fees or charges for "cancelling" if I don't call them in the e-mail either.
Once this has cancelled successfully I will book a flight "tomorrow" via a standard travel website.
If they suddenly e-mail me to say I am *not* going to be refunded, I may end up taking a punt on the flight being usable and see how it goes. But given *they* say I will be refunded, I don't expect to end up exploring that branch of the tree of possible outcomes here.
I think if they weren't doing this weird non-standard cabin baggage allowance I'd be feeling relatively comfortable with them and while annoying calling to do the payment verification wouldn't be a massive red flag. But the cabin baggage thing seems deeply sketchy and unpleasant.
Anyway, I'll sleep on it and see what happens. Tempted to waffle more but I'm just going to repeat myself endlessly.
I will just say the payment verification thing is *odd* (if fortunate, as it turns out). Normally when I pay for something online it either goes through or it doesn't, there and then. But whatever.
0234 Of course I can't leave well alone. It's always hard to tell, but no shortage of people complaining about kiwi on the web. Also no shortage of self-righteous twats making ridiculous arguments telling those people it's their own fault; it's not that the complainers always seem to be absolutely in the right, but the self-righteous twats often appear to completely ignore what the complainer is saying when *if true* they would have pretty solid complaints. Very hard to form a definitive opinion on whether the airline or kiwi sets the cabin bag policy, but I might guess there *is* an ultra-scumbag class ticket which kiwi are selling which does have these super-pathetic limits. Certainly lots of people have complaints about being hit with baggage fees on kiwi booked flights, and self-righteous twats aside lots of them seem to be saying they were told one thing when they booked and then found the reality was different when they came to fly. After all, it's not as if this is a multi-leg flight with lots of complex routing which would account for kiwi's ability to sell me a cheaper if perhaps "riskier" ticket than other more traditional travel sites, so there probably has to be *some* kind of catch to getting these flights for £16-ish less than other sites seem to offer. I guess if you really could fly with just a 4kg item you'd be laughing, and it doesn't seem like this ultra-scumbag class ticket I'm inferring exists is sold via most sites.
Anyway, I think I should have avoided allowing myself to pressure myself into booking a flight via them - yes I had started to think about booking this yesterday, *but* that was a £45-ish flight via a site I recognised, the kiwi thing was new to me tonight and I shouldn't have rushed in. But apart from that lesson learned, I think my position is unchanged that a) luckily I apparently have a GOOJF card b) I will sleep on it and then probably use that card and just pay £45 for a no-stress ticket c) kiwi are not *necessarily* dodgy, if not for kayak's crappy integration with them I'd have seen this 4kg limit up front and probably just not booked this particular flight with them, so while all this noise on the web is unsettling I am not absolutely writing them off for future use if it's somehow appropriate.
I think I'm getting a kind of "shit, it's Christmas, need to get this sorted beforehand" feeling which isn't helping. Also, if I *am* going to splurge on the new electronic travel guide, it would make sense to do so *before* I start doing any homework on Cartagena's internal geography, since that's one area where the up-to-date guidebook may well have semi-current and useful information.
Do feel a bit peeved I've gone through all this crap and all I've got out of it is a mildly-satisfactory three day booking for a hostel near Bogotá airport, but there you go. I guess I've forced myself to come to some correct if in hindsight blindingly obvious conclusions like "I need to read up on Cartagena before booking accommodation there" which had managed to elude my procrastinating and/or Christmas-befuddled mind until now.
It's probably clear, but when I say it's important to get the location in Cartagena right, I'm thinking mainly in terms of security. I don't want to accidentally end up in the middle of a slum, or find I've gone and booked myself something where I have to take expensive and perhaps risky taxis even to go out and about during the day. I'm sure I'll get less worried and perhaps even excessively blasé about this kind of thing as I gain experience, but to start with I do want to avoid putting myself at risk as much as possible.
1319 I had e-mails from kiwi earlier, including a confirmation of refund which shows the full amount. I still have lingering "can I trust this?" feelings but it's probably fine, anyway, I just need to wait now and check my credit card statement in a few days. Will probably book a replacement flight tonight.
I am a bit concerned now that I'm going to make a booking via another site and LATAM are going to get upset/confused because I have/have tried to buy two tickets, but just have to hope I guess. (There is some suggestion in the kiwi e-mails that *LATAM* have failed to verify my details, but I have no idea to what extent this is the case or to what extent it might matter.)
1508 Had a quick poke about rebooking the flight. kayak keep showing me prices via kiwi which is unhelpful. There are some budget airlines in there but the headline fares include *no* cabin or checked baggage, and (not that I'm sure if they're good value or not) the intermediate priced fares have checked baggage but not cabin baggage, which is the opposite of what I want. However, opodo have some LATAM flights at a bit under £45 (a pound or two cheaper than the same flights on expedia). I may book one of these, they want extra to choose a seat but I am thinking I might take a punt on not paying for a seat. Yes I don't *like* being stuck in the middle and I'm not super keen on window seat either, but I *have* done it and this is only a short flight and it seems like a good opportunity to stretch my comfort zone slightly. I'd sort of like to book now to get this sorted, but I'll let it slide until this evening.
1535 OK, I had a quick poke at my old electronic guidebook to get the basic geography down. A bit of a poke on the web and I've booked a private room for £71 for 7 nights (!) via booking.com; free cancellation until 11th January. The reviews are broadly positive (the usual weirdness, people saying there were cockroaches in the bathroom then rating it 7/10 - obviously I don't want cockroaches, but in places with that kind of climate you expect the odd one every now and then and *maybe* some people overreact a bit, I just don't know) and it felt like a decent-ish option, I can't resist a bargain, I really don't want anything "fancy", as long as it's basically clean and safe and this should meet the requirements there, it is pretty central so should be good for getting around without taxis as much as possible.
OK, I've had a confirmation e-mail, I thought I'd been stiffed for a hidden 19% VAT but that's only for Colombian citizens so it should be fine.
So I still need to book a flight but I will do that later. I *may* exercise my free cancellation right on this property, but I probably won't. I do like to keep costs down and as I say I'm quite happy with basic accommodation; this is a private room with a private bathroom so happy days really.
I may contact one or both of the places I've booked to pre-arrange airport transfers but I don't need to rush into doing that - I'd assume I can easily do that a week or two before I fly - and obviously for the one in Cartagena I don't actually know when I'll be getting to the airport yet as I haven't booked the flight. I may well make my own way from the airport in one or both cases, I would need to read up on this, but as I say this just doesn't have the urgency of booking accommodation where things might sell out and/or prices might go up.
1557 Must say I feel surprisingly relieved for having booked that accommodation in Cartagena. Yes, there's still the flight, but it feels like things are coming together. And I'm also happy to see the price is pretty decent, that gives me hope the trip as a whole won't turn out to be insanely expensive. Obviously I will splash out as and when there's something I really want to do which is expensive, but good to keep costs down where I can.
28th Dec 0852 I couldn't sleep properly. [20th Jan addition: not, if memory serves, for worrying about this as such. I just couldn't sleep properly for some reason so ended up getting up unusually early for me.] In any case, the kiwi flight refund seemed to go back onto my credit card the other day and I've just booked another flight Bogota-Cartagena on 26th January; this was a hair over £45 but that's OK, I had been getting antsy about prices going up during my semi-enforced inactivity over Christmas. This is a LATAM flight, I have 8kg of hand baggage allowance but not checked baggage, which should be fine. I decided not to splurge on choosing a seat, I hope I don't regret this but it's an hour and a half flight and I want to stretch my comfort zone a bit here (back to somewhere it used to encompass). Had minor row with parents due to wanting assistance with a pseudo-Scalextrix toy the grandchildren were playing with while trying to book, yay. (Heaven forbid they should have to wait, or put a few seconds of concentration into understanding how it works or why.)
Probably related in an indeterminate causal way with the not sleeping, I am starting to be a bit worried about the trip, imagining myself feeling nervous and/or lonely, but I'm sure this is mostly irrational. At least I have now got all the key elements booked, I still need to look into the airport transfer options and confirm various flights and bookings nearer the time, but this is all the main booking needed until I've arrived in Cartagena and decide how much longer I want to stay there.
I do have a lingering "did I rush into booking this *specific* flight?" concern - am I suddenly going to realise I booked for January 2021 in my haste, or similar - but it does feel sort of good to have this done.
I booked this via expedia, I did have a quick look on opodo first (I didn't bother with kayak) but for whatever reason they were way more expensive on these LATAM flights (£60+). They did have some Viva flights at pretty decent prices (£30? can't remember any more) but I looked and Viva give you a 6kg hand baggage allowance which isn't enough (and I also wasn't super impressed that opodo said "hand baggage included" but did not say how much no matter where you clicked; I had to go poking on the Viva air site) and even if I wanted to check a bag that would cost extra. It is actually just possible my bag would be under 6kg but I don't want to gamble on that at this point; once I'm actually on the trip with a definite set of bag contents and have flown a couple of times and seen how much it weighs I might be able to take a cheaper flight with someone like Viva for another leg of the trip.
1st Jan 1354 Have finally got the post redirection set up for the trip. On the one hand, I always want to start the redirection early to reduce the chances of post slipping through the cracks (e.g. it's posted before the redirection starts but not delivered until afterwards) and it ending up sitting in my easy-to-steal-from mailbox for months. On the other, I ideally want to be able to receive last-minute orders of stuff for the trip without that getting redirected. There's also an element of needing to time the receipt of the "we are redirecting your post for n months" letter so that it can't be stolen from my mailbox while I'm away right now visiting family for Christmas, as the last thing I want is to clue the personal stealing my post in to the fact that the flat will be empty for months. Anyway, I finally mentally balanced all these factors and actually got the redirection set up, so that's another minor chore sorted.
1409 Was thinking I'd probably splurge £4.99 on the Lonely Planet electronic guide book offer, but it seems to have finished. Some sites suggest it runs until mid January but it doesn't seem to be working, so they may have pulled it - there's some crappy "buy 2 get 1 free" offer instead. Gut feeling is if nothing better turns up I will content myself with my old electronic copy; I was willing to pay £4.99 for a new one but I'm not paying £12.59. In hindsight of course I should have bought this earlier, but then again I wasn't and aren't completely desperate. Quick poke on amazon suggests there's no other publisher selling anything cheap; there's a tiny 144 page Insight guide on paper which comes with a free ebook for £5.24, but that doesn't sound great.
4th Jan 1657 My intermittent attempts to purchase a cheap-but-decent smartphone on ebay over the last few months have failed. I now need to ramp up my efforts a bit, I've got a bid in for something at the moment and there are a couple of semi-commercial sellers selling the same phone for £55-60-ish buy it now at the moment, I may end up having to go with one of those. I had hoped/expected (based on previous sales) to get one second hand for £40-ish but as always seems to happen with ebay once I start to actually bid they never seem to sell quite as cheaply, and perhaps I never quite got far enough towards saying "fuck it, I'd better bid an extra five quid on this because otherwise I'll end up paying even more to buy something last minute". I had really been hoping to find something *extremely* battered (but with an intact screen) for even less - my requirements are a bit unusual, because this is a spare phone for emergencies and to carry around when I think I might get mugged, so I want it to *actually* be cheap and I want it to *look* cheap - but this hasn't come off.
Since I finished booking the flights and accommodation there's been little activity re trip preparation; I am going back to London tomorrow and once I get settled back in there I will probably start a mini flurry of preparations. I have ordered myself a two litre dry bag (I got a five litre one over Christmas) but it hasn't turned up yet; I am hoping these together will handle my laundry better than on previous trips when I used carrier bags. I don't need to do anything terribly difficult, but I need to research and possibly pre-book airport-accommodation transport and perhaps confirm some of my bookings and make sure I have the accommodation details printed on paper and marked on Google Maps etc etc.
I do have a broad background nervousness about the trip, it feels a little dangerous and/or stressful and/or lonely, but it's not too bad and I am trying to fight against this. I *do* want to do it, it's just that right now it feels a bit of a strain. I mean, the trip is *supposed* to be fun as well as vaguely challenging and so forth. And it probably will be; I think I need to make an effort not to overload myself with places I must go and things I must do and so forth. As long as I'm not spending all day every day in my accommodation that's fine. It would probably be a good idea - though it's really *not* in my nature - if I were able to at least at times to get into a cycle of getting up *relatively* early (9-10am) and going to bed a bit earlier, as I could then do wandering round casual tourism (sightseeing, coffee drinking, lunch eating) without always feeling a bit constrained and rushed by getting up at midday and leaving my accommodation around 1-2pm. But I just need to see how it goes, not beat myself up and take things as they come
2352 And while it's trite, it's also probably somewhat true that (even ignoring the fact the trip will probably be fun, despite almost inevitably having some of those wake-up-at-6am-feeling-lost-and-alone-for-a-couple-of-minutes incidents and similar) I will appreciate being at home (in all of its possible senses) much more for having been away for three months.
5th Jan 1841 I didn't win the auction I had left a bid on. I've just gone and bought a HTC One A9s 32GB for £55 secondhand buy it now. This is a bit more than I wanted to pay, but it's not terrible, and although I really would have preferred "cheap" to "good" for this phone, at least with it being the 32GB model (which I think has 3GB RAM instead of 2GB on the 16GB model; 16GB of *storage* would be fine for my use case, especially since it has a micro SD slot, but the extra 1GB of "real" RAM is probably a good thing) it should be a bit more usable and retain that usability for a bit longer. I had been really looking for a HTC One A9 actually, but this seemed a reasonably good (if not amazing) price and although it's hard to be sure, if gsmarena's specs are to be believed the A9s may have one single model for all territories and thus cover more 4G bands than the (presumably) EMEA A9 I would have been buying - this may be mildly helpful given I'm going to South America, although in reality what's *most* important is that I have a second phone which will work on wifi and which will be pre-authenticated for some of my critical accounts in the event the other phone is lost, stolen or broken.
On a more mundane note, I did pick up a "solid" stick deodorant the other day; I've been led to believe that these don't count as liquids (which is only rational, but this is a Security Concern and therefore that's perhaps not relevant) and therefore don't need to be squashed into the plastic bag when going through airport security. I don't plan to rely on this by packing the plastic bag extra full of other liquids, but it may be a tiny convenience boost.
7th Jan 1631 Got third rabies shot done. No problem, although the nurse told me that it lasts for five years (I didn't mention I'd thought it was ten), *and* (as I write this, the word "and" seems dubious) I need a booster shot before I go away after a year, but if I have a booster shot every year that will keep me going for life and I never need to get this three shot course again. TBH this is chronically unclear, but I don't need to clear it up now. I will probably be going away again in a year's time and at that point I can investigate whether I need a booster or not. I have no idea what's supposed to happen if I don't go away for (say) three years, which is within the five years mentioned, but get my first booster at that three year point. [20th Jan - I might hope you can have a booster any time within the first five years, otherwise in what possible sense does the vaccinations I've just had "last five years"?]
TBH given how I was already a bit iffy about the value of the rabies vaccination - the nurse did point out that I still needed medical attention if I was bitten, which I already knew - if I've understood these additional factors (it only lasts five years, and I still need a booster if I travel between 1-5 years from now) it seems even less worth the expense and hassle. But it's done now, and there's no harm except for the financial cost, and without committing the sunk cost fallacy *if* my understanding is correct, next time I travel the choice will be "one shot at approximately £58 for protection or don't bother", not "three shots at £58". If I don't travel, or don't travel to an area with rabies a notable threat, next year, I may want to try to find out whether I can avoid having the booster simply because a year has passed and can instead have it at any point within the first five years. Feh.
(Just for the record - I'm not unhappy or specifically confused about this - the nurse didn't write down a "next booster due" date in my vaccination booklet because he said he didn't know, as it would depend on when I travelled etc.)
1757 I suddenly thought I'd check if my normal UK SIM supports roaming - I'm *sure* it didn't used to, never mind the cost - and it looks like it does. The charges are absolutely insane (£1.50/minute to receive calls, £3.60/minute to make a call, £0.60 to text, £3.60/MB for data) but given the insistence of everyone on sending me text messages to confirm login details all the time and the difficulty/inconvenience of changing every single account to use my "travel SIM" number, I think I will take that SIM abroad with me as well as the travel SIM. I do have a £5 extra charges cap set on my account so I would hope that would prevent me from the worst possible surprises, and obviously I will turn off mobile data when roaming. Since I'm going to have two phones I will be able to have a SIM in each, although I suspect I may end up swapping SIMs around a bit and this could lead to accidents like enabling data roaming on the phone which contains the expensive "normal" SIM. I'm sure how I handle this will evolve with experience. I may well end up leaving the Priv in my room and only using it as a pseudo-laptop when I'm there and always carrying the HTC out with me normally, but even if that works out as I expect it's not all that clear to me if the "travel" SIM would be better living in the Priv or the HTC - I would like to be able to use data while out and about, but then again if I do get the phone lost or stolen I'd rather not lose the "irreplaceable" travel SIM with it and maybe I should have left that back at the presumably-more-secure hotel room in the Priv. I could imagine - if it's not insanely expensive - trying to buy a local SIM, sticking that in the HTC for out-and-about data use and keeping the travel SIM in the Priv back in my room, with the normal UK SIM stashed in my bag and only inserted periodically to check for text messages or if I end up needing to receive an authentication code on it (which shouldn't happen at the drop of a hat).
OK, looking at the "normal" SIM provider's FAQs, *everyone* who hasn't opted out has data billing capped at £41 per bill cycle. That would suck, but it is at least borderline tolerable if the worst happens. OK, and (I've taken a screenshot of this) they do implicitly confirm that the bill capping applies to roaming use, since they say that if you're in a non-inclusive destination and have a £0 cap you won't be able to use your phone, as any usage will be chargeable. So as long as the £5 cap is being applied, the potential downsides to taking the "normal" SIM abroad with me are very limited, and it could turn out to be useful.
2139 Being very lazy about getting on with my trip preparation, but I have been thinking about buying a couple of quid of Skype credit so I can call arbitrary numbers back in the UK. Obviously I hope to be able to use my "travel" UK SIM for that (Three's Go Roam or whatever they call it now), but if that doesn't work properly (as it didn't in Guatemala) or I simply lose that SIM/have it stolen it's good to have Skype as a fallback option, and I don't want to be fighting with a credit card company trying to authorise a purchase of Skype credit when I'm abroad and presumably already in the middle of some kind of banking snarl-up to require me to be making the phone call in the first place.
Skype's website is frankly confusing; the page showing the UK call rates has some kind of disclaimer about rates potentially being different if you're calling from outside the EEA, even though another page says the cost of a call depends on where you're calling *to* not where you're calling *from*. I also don't see how in practice this matters; surely Skype are routing my call via the internet until it reaches some point in the UK where they will initiate a normal telephone call. It wouldn't matter so much except it just says "standard rates" apply where the call originates outside the EEA, except the *only* rate information is that page with the "different outside the EEA" note at the bottom.
Just for the hell of it I did actually chat online with their support. Apparently the per-minute rates are the same (which I think is about 2p/minute for a regular UK landline; I may end up getting stiffed for 10.8p/min if I'm in a panic and have to call an 08xxx number, but that's tolerable) but the connection cost may be different and that is controlled by the UK telecoms provider for the number, but is usually less than the per-minute rate. I can't say I'm super confident about this information, but it's probably OK and I'm only looking at buying a couple of quid of credit anyway.
Ah no, I see you don't get to *choose* how much Skype credit you buy. There are three options, the smallest of which is £5, and that's that. (It's also a bit annoying that they won't offer me the option to pay in USD, as I have some USD in my PayPal account which I'd rather spend directly to avoid poor exchange rates and fees. Though I guess Skype might then end up charging me crappy exchange rates if they have my account marked as a GBP account.)
I'm probably going to have to buy this anyway, but I'm going to sleep on it now. I feel like I'm being played and don't want to just get caught up in the momentum of "well I was going to top up so I'll just accept being forced to pay one of three pre-selected amounts. I mean, maybe having a *minimum* is fair enough, but why not let me choose an arbitrary larger amount? It would be super convenient for me if I could make it £7, as I have a non-top-upabble prepaid card with £7 on which I'm struggling to use because I need to spend *exactly* £7 on it.
OK, poking around on the site it looks like they will let me change my account currency and I can select USD. This would involve them converting my tiny £0.18 balance at a possibly sub-optimal rate, but I could live with that. They do support PayPal so I might *hope* I would then be able to pay with my USD PayPal balance, and perhaps even only buy $5 credit not £5 credit.
Right, Skype appear (not unreasonably) to use IP geolocation to show prices, at least when you're not lgged in. Assuming I would simply be a USD customer with no iffiness after a change of currency, it would be 2.3 cents/minute to call the UK and I could probably top up $5. In GBP they want to charge me 2p/minute; as of right now, Google says 2p/minute is 2.6 cents/minute, so all else being equal (which it may very well not be) I am getting a small saving here from having a USD account on Skype. Although in reality I'm more interested in minimising the amount of credit I have to buy and maybe being able to use that inconvenient USD PayPal balance up a bit.
Still probably going to sleep on this. It's petty but I'm going to feel stupid if I try to play games and end up getting stung with a few quid in fees somewhere.
8th Jan Tinkering with the new phone and the Three app, it looks like they've actually improved their deal since last time - it now seems to be £10 for *4GB* data and unlimited calls/texts for 30 days. Can't help wondering if there's a catch, but anyway. I don't want to top up until nearly the last minute as that way I may be able to avoid having to pay for four addons over the course of my 90 day trip.
Thu 9th 0042 Right, I went ahead and boldly changed my Skype account to USD (my £0.18 turning into $0.22, which is fine) and I seem to have been able to top up $5 using my USD PayPal balance without incurring any stray fees. I have a $5.22 balance at Skype, which should be good for about 200 minutes of calls, and I've managed to use some of my relatively useless USD balance at PayPal and I've managed to top up less than the £5 minimum had I left my account in GBP. I don't intend to use Skype for making phone calls routinely, but it's always good to have multiple options for communication as and when things go tits up. And if I don't buy a Colombian SIM card, it may useful for calling Colombian numbers on, should the need arise, as those would be prohibitively expensive on either of my UK SIMs.
1906 I've had an e-mail from booking.com reminding me that my free cancellation period on the Cartagena accommodation is nearly up, which is quite nice really. I don't think there's any reason I would want to cancel. I've just cross-checked the flight from Bogota-Cartagena with the check in date and they match, and it's not as if I've suddenly come across any new information which would make me think the booking is a bad idea. I just checked the booking.com reviews, there are a couple of newish ones but both are glowing, so it's not as if I've suddenly got reason to believe this is a terrible place. They're very very gently (in a totally inoffensive way) offering to upgrade me to a double bed for a couple of quid for the entire stay, but I'm not really that bothered. Actually it's confusing, there are three upgrade options and the next is £20+ more and is still a double bed; perhaps the room is larger but there's no actual size shown (it just says "Room size: m^2" for both with no actual figure). This makes me particularly disinclined to upgrade. Also it may well be that a cheaper double bed is going to have less non-bed floor space making the room feel extra cramped. Best not to fiddle at the moment, stick with my initial choice and if necessary or desirable I can always discuss paying for a room upgrade once I'm there, and if I decide to stay for more than my pre-booked nearly-a-week I can of course choose a different room for the following week's booking.
1924 FFS. I've just thought I'd go and do a bit of prep and print out some stuff ready for the trip, and it seems that the place in Cartagena is *not* a hostel or hotel with a 24h desk and I need to schedule a time to check in with the host. Cocksuckers. This was *not* clear when I booked. I am probably not going to cancel - the price is good and it has good reviews and I fucking hate choosing accommodation - but this is fucking annoying. I will schedule this once I decide on how to travel from the airport to the accommodation; if I decide to go with any transfer service the accommodation offers then that would influence what we agree. At least by this point I will have been in the country for a few days and should have established if I have mobile data and had a chance to buy a local SIM if necessary.
On the plus side, the booking confirmation does give the exact latitude/longitude of the accommodation, which is a nice touch. Yes, it's *probably* on Google Maps by name, but it's good to have this explicit information to avoid any confusion.
Without having done any further research, I note (again; I saw it when I booked) the Bogotá accommodation near the airport says it is COP15,000 approx for a taxi from the airport to the accommodation or they will arrange a pickup for COP25,000. I think that's about an extra £2.50; given I expect to be frazzled (irrational or not) by the time I get there, I just may splurge on pre-booking this, but I will do a bit of research first. It also says there is a bus which costs COP1,700 (virtually free), but given a) I will have my bag with all my belongings with me b) it will be dark (if only early evening) c) I will be absolutely fresh off the boat with my Spanish relatively rusty d) I will be knackered after the flight, this seems penny wise pound foolish. It *does* tempt me, and it feels a bit weak not to go for this option, but all the same I'm probably not. Just possibly on other days and other airport transfers I might go by public bus but not this one. (Actually the price is a bit more complicated; that COP15,000 price is if you go to the "ground transportation terminal"; if you take a taxi from the airport it's around COP15,000-COP20,000, there is a warning about the taxi driver trying to take you to another hotel and it also says the price cannot exceed COP20,000 and not to let them charge you more. FFS. This may just be the hotel trying to entice you into their COP25,000 pickup, and/or it may be that although these minor scams *do* occur they are not a really regular problem and you're unlikely to experience them.)
OK, that's everything printed out in duplicate and copies also stashed as PDFs on Dropbox - this is the two flights (London-Bogota and Bogota-Cartagena) and the two sets of accommodation. I've actually only printed one copy of the London-Bogota flight confirmation as I assume (despite having reserved seats) I can/must check in online the day before and therefore I will be printing the resulting boarding pass in duplicate at that point - having a single printout of the flight details with the booking number on will do, I will only need it if my printer breaks the day before the flight or similar.
2036 I have to say, I feel a bit more positive and even excited about the trip for having made this bit of an effort to work on the preparations.
I have no idea how authoritative it is, but I found https://medellinguru.com/lonely-planet-colombia/ which seems to be very negative about the 2018 Lonely Planet Colombia guide book. This makes me even more disinclined to splurge the full price when I already own the 2012 edition.
11th Jan 0055 Just tested USB OTG with my SD card reader on the Priv; there's no logical reason this shouldn't have worked, but seemed prudent to try it.
13th Jan 1347 I really should post this lot, shouldn't I? Anyway, misc ramblings.
Had a slightly confused (it was >2am) chat with Z+D on Saturday night about airport transfers in Colombia. I think - not sure I hadn't already concluded this - I will splurge/allow the hotel to manipulate me into paying for their COP25k transfer from the airport in Bogotá (rather than hoping I can pay 15-20k for a taxi I sort out myself on arrival), because modulo "will they bother to turn up?" type worries, this way I can minimise stress and hassle on the already emotionally fraught outbound trip. I will probably look to book this in the next day or two. I will see how I feel about getting to the airport to fly to Cartagena - it just may be possible, once I've had a day or two lurking around and perhaps even tried doing it, for me to walk (20 mins) to the airport from that hotel, or maybe the public bus doesn't look too scary. Not so sure about arrival in Cartagena; it's not too clear the accommodation offers a service anyway, but I will have a read around on the web over the next few days. This is marginally less critical, I could really do this research once I'm in Bogotá if I want, but it's probably best to do it now if I can.
I am procrastinating a bit on my preparations (e.g. checking I have everything, trial packing the new bag) but am doing a bit. Sort of under pressure wrt these "physical" preparations as I'm off up to Skegness tomorrow. I am trying to tell myself that I can watch all the Youtube videos and the like I want once I'm actually on holiday. :-) Obviously I don't want to do nothing but that kind of thing, but it's an undeniable fact that I can't/won't be busy socialising or sightseeing or drinking on my own in bars and worrying about how to get home safely every single night, so while I obviously want to resist the temptation to overdo it the reality is if anything I'm going to be *desperate* for decent content I haven't watched once I'm on the trip, and if anything I should be saving it up now rather than watching it as part of my procrastination.
1836 Have completed a test pack of the new bag. I don't quite have everything in but even with a mostly full 500ml water bottle it's weighing at 5.5kg. This seems way too good to be true. It doesn't include the fleece (about 500g empty, and I would have a few bits and pieces in its pockets) as I will be wearing this during the flight - but yes, the fleece does (just) fit in the bag along with the other stuff - and 77g of PackTowl but it is pretty much everything else as far as I can see, including my plastic bag of liquids. The new bag (even with the fleece in) will fit inside the old one and the old one will still zip up, and the new one is pretty squishy, so fingers crossed I am not going to get shafted on hand baggage size limits here (and of course the fleece won't be in the bag when I am going through airports, as they're air conditioned and by wearing it I avoid it bulking out the bag).
I hope this new bag holds up; there's a comforting solidity to the old bag (Voyageur, as recommended by onebag.com, and having taken it on every trip since 2010 onwards I know it's pretty rugged) but the new bag has to be a worthwhile experiment since the saving on weight is impressive. I obviously haven't taken the new bag out but I did put it on in the flat for a few minutes and it's almost light enough to be negligible. I suppose if I don't get on with it, barring really nasty surprises where it just tears right open in the middle of nowhere, I can always buy a cheap bag over there and pack the ultra-light one inside to avoid throwing it out, and it shouldn't come to that really.
